Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ryan wakes amorphously, the hands of sleep loosening their grasp one finger at a time, sleep flowing into languor as the river flows into the sea. In this brackish water amidst dream and lucidity, he’s back on the pool floor, where the light dances in white ribbons and the sky above ripples through a glaze of blue. Gently, all at once, the tiles dislodge and drift away, floating up from beneath him to roll amongst curling waves above. He sinks deeper, through the vast and open ocean revealed beneath the ceramic floor, deeper down until the sediment lifts up in a cloud around him and the sun fills the rippling sky.    

This deep down, his senses return to him just drip by drip, droplets of awareness pattering onto the waves above. It’s all muffled and muted, sunk here beneath the depths, where the weight of the sea keeps him submerged and his thoughts drift with the current, carried away from him, headed towards shore. He’s lying flat upon the seabed, where the creases of the sheet resemble ripples in the sand, the foggy exhales of breath rise through the air like bubbles floating up to the surface, and where the duvet swells over the warm air trapped beneath it, like the tide that lays above beams of sunlight that are dragged through the undertow. It has enveloped him in a warmth seeped so deep, even the darkness behind his closed eyes seems to hold a ruddied glow. 

He lets himself drift, lets himself stay sunk within this surreal peace. He is often slow to wake, as with how his sleep is short and restless, more often does morning bring exhaustion with it than night ever does. However, never does he feel so lured by it, nor ever so gently released from its hook. He floats down the estuary between sleep and waking, as drip by drip, his senses give shape to the true form of the world around him. There is birdsong out the open window, each note carried in on its own fine strand of the wind, blowing inside intertwined with wisps of woodsmoke, tendrils of white ash and threads beaded with dewdrops. This woven wind wafts into the room, biting cold and weighted, coiling through and diffusing the gossamer sweet, hazy fog cloud that swirls and spirals through the air. He drifts, through the estuary, through the ocean beneath the pool floor, through the hazy fog of dissolved honey, he drifts. Then something in the air, ever so slightly in the cold, woven and laden air, something shifts.       

It nips at the exposed skin of his face, an attempt to draw the warm blood that’s in his veins, blood that pumps lethargically through his heart and pools in his hand. His fingers twitch. It tightens his already firm grip. The last droplets fall not alone, but in a sheet of rain, pelting down upon the sea. Down on the seabed, the ensuing tidal wave is strong enough to rock him as it lurches past, but not to exhume him, remaining on his back even as he follows the movement with a leftwards roll of his head. Ryan cracks his eyes open and for a moment the blurriness of sleep makes the dark room look as if it really is underwater. He gives a tight squeeze of a blink and only now does he find himself truly awake.

Dylan sleeps on however, not a twitch to his expression. Still not assured, or perhaps just out of selfish longing, Ryan watches him through drowsy blinks. He sleeps just as he said he would, though it’s more at a slight angle than it is directly across the width of the bed. Likely just so he can have his head propped up on the pile of pillows that are shoved in the corner of both room and bed. The duvet only half covers him like this and overtop it a thermal blanket has been tugged over him to fill in the gap. His right leg is bent inwards, unconsciously providing a space for Dinger between them, saving Ryan from forewarned suffocation as she instead sleeps placidly by his shoulder. His other leg, specifically his calf, is draped over Ryan’s ribs. 

It’s this that Ryan’s hand wraps around, in a grasp come of such an innate and ingrained possessiveness that it was made even in his sleep. With fingers over his shin and thumb hooked around the back, pressing into muscle. He knows he should, but he finds himself unable to unfurl his fingers. Instead, in a poorly shaken habit, Ryan’s eyes are drawn up to linger on the vermilion border of Dylan’s lower lip. Where it is always split and swollen from the constant chewing and scraping of his front teeth in thought and feeling, where completely irrelative to this, to Ryan it has always been and remains unceasingly and entirely captivating. It’s only from there, in the dim shade of his upper peripheral vision, that Ryan just barely catches the flickering and rapid paced movement happening behind closed eyes. 

Dylan sits up with a lurch. Pin straight upright, with eyes that are foggy yet wide, an expression of a sluggish kind of disturbed. The flickering movement behind closed eyelids now ceased, he instead unwaveringly stares off to somewhere Ryan is certain he could not follow. From the corners of his eyes, in the mist of his breath, dripping from his nose and from the pores of his cheeks, beads aery tears of scorched sugar. Like melted wax, it follows the tracks left by the sweat rolling down from his temples and what doesn’t pool alongside it in his collarbones, is instead whipped around the room in a scalding hailstorm. For a moment there is nothing in the stillness but the heavy thud of his heart, audible deep within Ryan’s inner ear. Then another and another and he still doesn’t move, petrified in place, the rapid shallow breaths and heavy drumming pulse the only life beneath the marble. Without a word to startle him, Ryan’s hand gives a feather light and gentle squeeze to the hold of his leg already in place. Dylan’s eyes snap to him, his pupils dilating even further, becoming the black pits of a shark’s.

“Ryan.” He says simply, almost a matter of factly, if not for the slightly startled tilt. For minutes he says nothing more, doesn’t so much as twitch, as his eyes now dart around and his breathing maintains its quickened pace. “Ryan- you’re here?”

In a quiet echo, “I’m here.”

“Right. Yeah.” For the first time since his upright lurch awake, he unfreezes, even if only through just a slight judder of his head and neck. He swallows thickly and makes a failed attempt to thread a light breath of laughter through his words. “I uh, I- I thought they shot you, for a second there.”

“I’m here.” Ryan softly repeats, his voice still thick and deep from sleep, so unlike Dylan’s own laboured, breathless tone. “It was a dream. I’m okay- you’re okay. You’re at home, we’re in your room.”

“Yeah. No. Yeah, I know.” It holds no conviction and the burnt wax-like honey still chars holes in the walls, but after he sucks in a deep lungful of air through his teeth and a slow exhale through pursed lips, with no small effort he manages to slow his breathing to a calmer rhythm. 

Ryan just watches him in the moments following, with his thumb absentmindedly swiping back and forth, looking up from where his head remains against his borrowed pillow. Within his mutated vision, true darkness has lost its gloom and exists only in shades of grey instead, where not a single feature is obscured despite the early morning of which dawn has not quite yet reached. Dylan’s expression is more of a closed mouthed slack jaw than it is to one steeped in taunt lines of tension. He woke disconcerted and disorientated, groggy from sleep despite his agitation, likely unsure if he had even woken at all. Ryan doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t speak at all, he just lets him find his way back. Silently, Dylan takes the time he needs to reorient, to feel the blanket beneath his fingers and trace the familiar outlines of the furniture in his room with his eyes. He needs it, to find where he actually is, amidst the vivid memory of what he just experienced and the truth of the reality which he didn’t.

When Dylan told him of his nightmares, he doesn’t know what he expected. Ryan admittedly hadn’t ever imagined sobbing, screaming, weeping or panicked thrashing- it’s hard in any circumstance to imagine Dylan doing any of these things and he has no desire to try. Maybe he hadn’t actually imagined anything at all. He knows that he hadn’t expected this. This was a body awoken with eyes looking past the world to somewhere only they could see, rooted to a tear in the veil that usually separates the dreamscape. In a stare of such harrowed transfixion, one with such presence to it, that Ryan felt how real it was to him. So real to him that Ryan himself almost felt like he could see the shrouded dreamscape through the reflection in his haunted eyes. Or, worse still, that had he just followed the gaze, he may have also seen what could come crawling out of it. He knows he couldn’t, but he doesn’t know if Dylan knew that. Not with the way he was staring into and out through this tear in the silk veil, one that was shredded open with edges frayed, one that showed no signs of sewing itself closed. That too Ryan doesn’t know and he doesn’t risk asking how long it may have taken to do so, had Dylan’s eyes not snapped from it and to Ryan instead. He knew Dylan had said it felt real. He hadn’t realised what that meant.

However long it takes is unclear, as the thumping heartbeat lulls and the horror-filled haze of confusion lifts, but he watches as slowly Dylan’s wide eyes soften from shark to deer. The marble casting him in place visibly cracks and chips away until he can fully shake off what dust is left clinging to his skin, arms slightly buckling from where they hold him upright, shoulders slacking and head dipping forwards. The sugar water takes on a new, bitter taste to it alongside the burn.

Through however long it takes, all the while, Ryan can feel his concern and tenderness carry through his pulse from his throat to his fingers. With his palm clutched around the side of his calf, he tries to radiate warmth from the arteries in his own wrist into the deep veins buried within it, to seep this tender calm from himself and infuse it within Dylan too. It may still be a futile attempt, but to his own surprise, it is not solely a symbolic one either. Even if not directly through the press of his pulse against skin, it radiates with such potency that for each heart beat, it overflows and pours into the air. For just a second, just one single second and perhaps for the very first time, even Ryan himself is able to pick out the scent of it. For just a single second and this he’s certain is for the first time, he can actually feel the presence of it, when it is something more than just an acrid miasma. He can feel how there is indeed something profound and imposing to it, an old growth forest that has no beginning and no end. With branches entwining over the walls and moss unfurling over the carpet, it rises into the air like the quietness enveloped beneath the canopy and it encases the room like a thicket laced with thorns. It is not the acrid and sharp scent of a forest on fire that he has only ever known before. Now it is both the impenetrable and unmoveable brambles that shield them within and so too is it the secluded sanctuary of the glade. 

It is just a single second that he picks it out before he loses it beneath the burnt and the bitter. A single second was all that was needed. He could feel how his love bound his scent together, the same as the forest loves the sun’s light. He could feel his own emotions in the air, transforming his scent into something both protective and gentle in one. He could feel that part of him that he has carved out that only Dylan can fill. Maybe it was only for a single second in an unknown number of minutes but he’s glad it’s gone. Maybe it was only for a second but the knowledge of what it’s really like, a knowledge seeped in anxious vulnerability, well, that lingers.  

Long after the second has been lost to minutes, long after Dylan has chipped himself from the marble encasing, he closes his eyes and drops his head to his hands. He wipes his face with such force he leaves red marks on his temples and seconds tick by, as the marks fade and he rests his hands over his cheeks, fingers lightly pressed in underneath his eyes. Until eventually he sighs and glances at Ryan from beneath his brows. “Ahm. Okay, um. I didn’t- I didn’t wake you, did I? You can try and get more sleep?”

“I was already awake.” Ryan tells him and even from his own mouth it is but a gentle sound beneath the wind. “Will you be able to fall asleep again?”

With another deeply drawn breath, Dylan blows it back out through his lips in a frustrated trill. He shakes his head in a resounding no, even as he does finally collapse back against his pile of pillows in the corner, landing gently propped up against them. With a practiced little nod and shake, he’s tucked his chin against his collarbone and under the neck of his hoodie, burrowed down until it covers up to just beneath his nose. His left hand thuds down against his chest, tugging with it the thermal, his sleeve over his fingers and adding to the bunched pile of fabric in his fist. Woken by the initial impact, Dinger rises and blocks Ryan’s view for a moment as she stretches, before she steps up and stands in a wobbly perch atop Dylan’s thigh. Spinning once, twice, she flops right back down, to just rather predictably slip into the narrow space between his leg and the wall. Unfazed by all this, she’s back to snoozing immediately and Dylan’s free hand sinks into her fur, stretched over her side where the slow and sporadic scrunching of his fingers fit something close to a loose definition of a pat. If Dylan hadn’t fully calmed before, the hand submerged in soft fur is what grounds him completely, burning sugar taken from the flames to now simmer. 

The two of them settled again, Dylan squeezes his eyes closed as he stiltedly says, “I’m sorry. S’stupid. I just- y’know I dreamt that- and then even though I know we came home- for a second- and I'm just right- urgh. Honestly I don't even know. Shit’s crazy.”

“At the quarry?” Ryan asks, before clearing his throat to try and clear the rasp of sleep. Then, because there is a stark difference to him, “Or at camp?”

“Is there a difference?” It’s an eerie answer to what was unspoken. 

“Isn’t there?”

Dylan shakes his head, his eyes still squeezed closed. Ryan thinks they’re speaking something unspoken, of something that can not be described in words but only in feeling. That even if they cannot say it, the two of them both have a watercolour painting splotching within their minds. For Ryan, all he sees is a library cast in a warm glow, a smile causing dimples within cheeks, Kaitlyn covered in blood but laughing so hard she cries, an imaginary cowboy hat being tipped, Emma’s brown eyes rolling at him, a lettuce leaf tangled in black hair while cooking dinner, front teeth sunk into the lip of a blinding smile, a half buried rock in a clearing and a hand threaded with his own. For Dylan, he thinks, all he sees is breaking bones and all that blood.

After this moment of quiet thought, with the fading of the watercolour bloom, Ryan risks asking, “Would you like there to be?”

“I want… or, I just wish- I don’t know. It’s so stupid to say out loud, because it’s so obvious, but I wish camp never happened at all. I wish I never had to go back. Y’know?”

“Then I would have never met you.” Ryan says and he may be unable to directly disagree with Dylan holding such a sentiment himself, but he has never felt more opposed to a statement than this before. Quickly he tacks on, “Or Kaitlyn or Emma or any of the others.”

“Yeah, god, you could’ve dodged a bullet there.” Dylan scoffs and doesn’t seem to notice the dipping of Ryan’s brows as he continues. “So okay, fine, maybe not all of camp. Just- I’m not even mad at Jacob or anything, I mean that just feels kind of pointless since it’s not like he knew. It’s just, yeah, wish we could’ve just… gone home. Have none of it happen.”

Ryan gives a hum of acknowledgment, though not necessarily agreement. It’s tripping and tentative, when he says, “I guess. Just, it did happen though. And- and maybe we can’t change that and maybe it was terrible- no, it was, it was terrible. I mean, what I’m trying to say is we don’t have to still suffer for it. We get that choice.”

“I suffer for it whenever I have to go back there. Which is for the rest of my life, mind you, never mind what comes after that. Kinda unfair that my eternal suffering has commenced a bit early. Not the pick I would have made if it was one.” Dylan quips after he’s given a snort, like it was a joke that Ryan made, not another of his genuine attempts clearly failing once afuckinggain. “So, not much of a choice there. I know, I know, it could be worse and we could have died, any of us. I’m glad we’re still kicking or whatever, and like, yeah I know you’re only here because we do still have to keep going back but-”

“I would be here even if none of this ever happened, just if you asked.” That was entirely too honest. That was too honest wasn’t it? Ryan probably should have stopped himself from saying that at all, let alone in a tone above what is suited for the early morning. With the hush of it lost, the statement came out firmer than he would have ever intended, in a way that it matches his true sentiment on the matter. How true it is to him. 

“Oh. Oh, that’s, uh- thank you. Um.” Dylan wavers and goes quiet for a moment, which Ryan finds himself glad for. He needed the chance to gather his composure, forcing himself to let the embarrassing admission go so he can pay proper attention again. With a sniff and tiny cough in quick succession, Dylan continues on to breezily explain, “I just meant that, well, here I just want it to be us, you know? Not what we’ve become. Dylan-Dylan and Ryan-Ryan, not werewolf Dylan and werewolf Ryan. If that makes sense.” 

He may hum an agreement but that’s the difference isn’t it? Ryan-Ryan is werewolf Ryan now. There’s no distinction between them and there’s no going back to when there was. He found his acceptance with it and he has not doubted once that this is, at the absolute very least for just Ryan himself, what was needed to do to feel like himself again. He is himself again. This is the first time the decision to do so has hurt. It is not the first time being so, being himself, has hurt. He is what he has become, Ryan thinks, but he knows it’s more than that. He always was what he has become. 

It’s not like he feels a chasm open between them or anything so drastic, it’s just an old and familiar feeling reinforced. It feels like childhood again. As even then, he knew that there is something within his very core of being that is just… Off. Not terribly, just slightly, something a little off. He knows it and he can call it whatever he likes, find whatever excuse he can, from being born with it, to being raised with it, to autism, to a goddamn werewolf curse, it doesn’t really matter. It just is. Ryan makes connections, he does. He has family, he has friends. He has Sarah and his grandparents, Kaitlyn and Emma. Before them he had Chris, he had Kaylee and Caleb, before even them he had his Dad, he had his Mom. He has Dylan here now, lying beside him, calf in his palm. Still there is just something within him, the truth of him, in being himself, something that is just off and it’s his biggest fear that others know it too. 

He’s not quite sure what it is. A separation maybe, a sheet of ice between him and everyone around him, where he looks out as a witness, never quite melting through. If not simply that sheet of ice, then maybe it is the raw animal he keeps frozen behind it, trapped within the iron barred cage within the concave of his chest. The animal he is, with claws that would sink into all he can, taking chunks of flesh with him when he is inevitably shaken off and forced to let go. Worse, he thinks, is the prospect that maybe in this coalescence he has shown his bloodstained claws. Worse than that, if he unwillingly knows it to be true, is that neither ice nor cage has ever contained it at all. He learned as a child that was what growing up meant, that it was to let go over and over again. His room is bare, he has no keepsakes, he has only three photos, he doesn’t say his name. He cherishes his truck, he keeps a box of DVDs hidden beneath his bed, his Pop implying he loved him misted his eyes, he checks his phone obsessively each night for a simple text goodnight, he does not let go of Dylan’s calf, he never really will. For all he has changed, Ryan’s hands are still bloodstained and there were already chunks of flesh embedded beneath his claws. Ryan always was what he has become.

In the lull fallen between them, Ryan finds this silence between them to be one that he does not know how to break. It’s not out of hurt, it doesn’t hurt, this was no new realisation for him. Really, it doesn’t hurt. It’s more, well, it’s more from how steadfast he remains in the face of it. Yes, that’s what it is, a resolution. He knows it to be the truth, that Dylan’s suffering does not have to be inevitable and that is not changed by this something ‘off’ that exists within Ryan, which is on him and him alone. He will roll that boulder up that hill until Dylan does not have to suffer for it each time he returns to the quarry. He will take the title of Sisyphus until behind Dylan’s eyes, all that blood is more than just red and the watercolour can bloom in a mosaic of kinder memories. 

What Ryan won’t do, is push it when Dylan has woken fresh from a nightmare and stated so plainly that he does not want to bring it here, to his home. Here to his home, where it already lurks, not just in the tear through to his dreamscape or lying in his bed beside him. It’s already here within him too and maybe he already knows that, maybe he just doesn’t want to hear it spoken. So Ryan will not speak it. He has not spoken it. With admirable effort, he has completely kept his eyes from his throat, has erased all images and thought of the scar there from his mind, as if it were his own nightmare haunting him in his awake. He resolutely does not think of it and he does not speak it and he is not hurt and there is no chasm to call across. Ryan just doesn’t know what else to say. When all that blood remains red, what else could he ever possibly say, that would be loud enough to be heard over that resounding, unspoken something? No joke appears on his tongue, no mild observation on the weather comes forth, no casual remark can be found. 

Dylan however, of course it’s Dylan, he always knows how to shatter silence. Sure, he lets it sit for some minutes, but he doesn’t seem to ever exist within it long. No, it’s never unbreakable to him. Selfishly grateful, for both this fact and for Dylan’s obliviousness to what was churning in his mind, Ryan doesn't argue the first point as he might have otherwise. He just lets Dylan shatter the silence into dust swept behind them, breezing on past as he says, “Alright, I’ll stop being a bummer. What time is it then?”

Just like that. He acts like it’s so easy. Taking the chance provided, Ryan lets the thoughts blow away into dust, distracting himself with where he left his phone instead. Which, lifting just his head up to take a craning look around, that would be… That would in fact be on the bedside table to his right, which does present a minor issue. Once more, even if Ryan knows he should, he is truly unable to let go of his grasp. Not yet, in a literal sense; not ever, in another. Instead, making it far more difficult than it needs be, Ryan awkwardly twists to reach his left arm over himself and near blindly fishes his phone from the surface. Retrieving it with more than a slight sense of accomplishment, he settles back down, lifts the phone up and immediately squints from the flash of bright light. With an audible thud of his knuckles against his sternum, he thumps it down against his chest and squeezes his eyes closed in an attempt to clear the splotching bleach stains in his vision. 

It’s only the snort sent in his direction that has him tilting his head and cracking an eye open again. Dylan squints at him in a smile that may be hidden but is obvious nonetheless. “Real smooth. Phone one, Ryan zero.”

“It’s basically six.” He croaks.

“Thanks, great. You know my phone was right there, yeah?” Dylan nods down to the phone that Ryan does in fact only now notice is lying between them. Right where it’s within a slightly less awkward reach, thanks to the couple meters long charger threaded beneath his pillow. Clearly it’d just been hidden under Dinger’s fatass all night, as her own personal heating pad. No, great, super helpful of Dylan to only point it out now, after Ryan has already been blinded twice. 

“You trying to set us on fire?” Ryan groans, flopping his head back against the pillow and closing his eyes again as he rubs his free arm over them. “After what I just went through for you?” 

“Isn’t that what you wanted to do to my desk?” Dylan nags in turn and yep, he’s back, in all his glory and snark.

Beneath the arm over his eyes, he makes a vague grunting sound, cause yeah, he did. Then, as the information dredges up in his mind, he finds himself mumbling away in acquiescence. “Mh, yeah, okay, ‘spose it’d track. Norsemen, or y’know, Vikings, they did bury and cremate their pets with them actually. ‘Specially for men, or uh, I guess a desk? Yeah, well for a desk of such high regard that it’s getting a ship burial, then having thralls or even a widow sacrificed to be buried with it, to accompany it to the afterlife, would I guess yeah, it’d make sense. Don’t know when I signed up as a sacrifice for your stupid desk but…”

“Right, for sure, that was definitely what I was getting at.” Dylan quietly laughs at him again, his voice hushed but his tone now well and truly returned to its usual casual and perpetually amused sound. “Six am and you still somehow remember all that? You got Viking funerals and human sacrifice just always swimming around up there or- why do we know this?”

“Generally, I would’ve just read it in some book at my school library or in any number of the random articles I’ve ever found. Uh, but specifically, this’ll be due to the spiritual aspect, ‘cause of the uh, y’know, the supernatural stuff. So kinda yes?” Ryan does answer the question genuinely while he drops his arm back down and tilts his head to Dylan’s direction again. Looking at him now however, he twitches a cheek and starts with a scoff, “And okay, yeah, it’s six am and yet if I asked how many constellations you could name right now…?”

Immediately and undeniably beat, Dylan’s nose does an adorable little scrunch which, even though it’s covered, betrays his put out and reluctantly amused scowl. Undeniably beat and of course he still tries to deny it anyway. “Mmh, nope, not the same. You’re an information-filled sleeper agent activated by anything vaguely paranormal, while I have a cheatsheet.”

“No no, off the top of your head, closed eyes, how many could you do?” Ryan digs and with Dylan’s indignant squint proving his point, he grins up at him. “Yeah, thought so. No cheatsheet needed. But hey, trying to pretend otherwise when you literally have half the universe glued to your ceiling is bold, I’ll give you that.”

With a dramatic sigh from beneath his hoodie, Dylan finally concedes. “Fine, you got me. Made a valiant effort, but clearly remain unable to beat the nerd allegations. I humbly beseech you to not go spreading rumours of my star ceiling around to people and further tarnish my reputation of being a super cool badass. Please.”

“Hey, I think the star ceiling is cool. Even if I’ve never been more let down than I was finding out they don’t glow.” Ryan tells him seriously, shifting his gaze up to the stars, pinpricks of grey against a slate of it. It helps too, to look away, when something as simple as Dylan saying please does something to him.

“Mh, sorry to disappoint, you’re about a decade late. They were admittedly cooler when I was nine, unfortunately.” Dylan tells him, refusing to sit up and instead just making a vague grabbing motion with his hand. While he continues speaking, Ryan thoughtlessly presses his own phone into his palm, putting all his effort to use and avoiding the awkward backbending of his arm if he’d tried to snag the makeshift heat pad itself. “They’re still accurate to the constellations, at least. It’s my cheat sheet. God, you should’ve been there when we put them up though. Mom'll tell you, I was like an evil little foreman who let the power go to my head. Oh, plus they still make pretty great shurikens if the need arises.”

Of course they’re accurate. Ryan shouldn’t have even considered the possibility of anything otherwise. As Dylan speaks, Ryan chews on the inside of a growing smug smile and takes his phone as it’s handed right back to him, only now with the flashlight turned on. He doesn’t need to be asked, he just dutifully aims it up to the ceiling. Out of the kindness of his heart he doesn’t point out that they’re not actually a cheat sheet if they need to already be memorised anyway and instead he just grants Dylan his last point with a light huff of a laugh. “Sure, ‘course. Does the need often arise?”

“Oh, you know it.”

Even if the stars no longer glow in the dark, with the light now shining on them, the glitter baked into the plastic still glimmers. Lying beneath them, with only the flash for light amidst the morning dark, it’s actually a rather enchanting view. Ryan hates winter and they sit on its precipice, yet for as chilled as the room is, it is seeped in a warmth, like the glitter reflection is truly the light of them. Silence settles over them as they take it in- as Dylan takes it in. For Ryan, as always, his eyes drift back down instead, to Dylan beside him. Dylan, cocooned in his hoodie and blankets, warm and quiet in the peace. Dylan, looking up at his ceiling like it’s the first time he’s ever seen it, the glimmer reflected in his wide brown eyes. Dylan, looking at the stars as if there isn’t sunlight beneath his own skin. The fog of honeyed calm has gradually returned to the air and now it hangs beneath the stars, the same as the clouds beneath space. Ryan looks up through it and sees the gentle waves rippling against the ceiling. A haze saturates the room to blue, a heavy weight swirls over him, a breathless buzz swells his lungs. He breathes sugar in and exhales salt out.      

“Do you have a favourite? Of the constellations, I mean.” Ryan whispers in one breath. At Dylan’s hum, Ryan spares another to ask, “Point it out to me?” 

“I’d say Hydra, but Scorpius leeches the win through association.” He murmurs back or maybe the sound is just muffled beneath the tide. He points up to his ceiling, tracing his finger down. “That would be it there. I can name them, but constellations don’t really interest me as much as the stars within them do. That’s Antares there in the middle, the heart of Scorpio.” 

“Your favourite star?” Another hum, a little more committal this time, still no less muffled despite the way he has tugged the hoodie from over his mouth at last, to twiddle the drawstrings between his fingers instead. The ocean sound it is then. “How come?”

Dylan tries to shrug the question off, with a hushed little laugh and a whisper, “You know I’ll start talking about it for hours.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Ryan tells him and there’s a pause. Ryan holds his breath in each second past. Then Dylan begins to speak.

“Okay, uh well, it’s a red supergiant, so, super easy to see. Oh, well, not so much from here though. It’s uh, it’s one of the largest known stars, around fifteen times bigger than the sun. Actually one of the brightest too, I think also around the fifteenth? Around that. Uh, also, it sits on the ecliptic, which- that’s like the path the sun takes and the planets follow it. Uh, that means though, that it often got confused for Mars. Which is why, funnily enough, its name roughly translates to ‘Not Mars’. And that, I mean that fact alone would probably be enough to make it my favourite. Though, when I was younger, it was-” 

He speaks in this echoing hushed tone, like the ocean sound ricocheting off black rock slick with salt water, his airy laugh dissolving amongst the seafoam. Ryan watches his fingers twitch at the start of every sentence, he traces the outline of his mouth forming each word, he breathes in every exhaled syllable, he etches each letter into his very bones until one day, when they find his remains, they will read of the stars.

He looks upward as Dylan’s explanations ebb to a quiet listing of each constellation and his various favourite stars within them placed upon his ceiling, following each path his hand traces with heavy eyes. The heady scent in the room has replaced all air and even the ropes of woven wind dissolve within the saltwater. The birdsong and creak of the stairs are all muffled under the lilt. Vaguely he thinks of ceramic tiles and stinging chlorine and a necessary fervency and then that dissolves away too. No sense left within him can create heed for him to spare for it, lulled by the lilting sound and as suffocated as they are. So too, after months of insomnia he has no struggle against those pale hands of sleep as they rise through the bedsheet again, raking nails through his skin in their attempt to hook fingers into his limbs. To be grappled in their hands means to be left with a mind leaden in drowsiness, one that indulges itself with emotion, one narcissistic of its own abstraction and one that releases the vividity of dream to meld with all thought. He knows this and yet he lets the fingers curl around his arms, cling to his legs and hook into the corners of his eyes. He knows it and it feels like gnosis.     

For if his hands are stained with their blood and if beneath his claws are the chunks of flesh torn from those of which he cannot let go of, then it is Dylan who he does not only bruise in his grasp now, it is Dylan who he has buried far deeper than merely down to the quick. He may feel Dylan in his skin, however now he realises that flesh can slough away, his heart can be eaten by decay, his face can turn to wax and his mind, with his memory, his morals, his emotions, what is truly the essence of everything he was in life, well, that can scatter back into the world in atoms merely borrowed and returned. It is in his bones that Dylan will stay. There he will always be able to be found, as with him imbued through to the honeycomb core within, it is there in the hollows that Ryan keeps him. 

In all the countless poems he has read, none of them have even described, let alone captured, what this feels like. It’s love, yes, and it’s one he has never felt before. He’s dated, he’s had flings through school, even if none of them were the conventionally serious type. All the same, outside of fumbling around in the dark with someone he met that night at the edge of a party he didn’t even care to attend, Ryan doesn’t really have interest in dating without a base of trust first, he never has. It was always when friends turned into something more and so yes, he did genuinely love them, he loved them first, he loved them during and he knows it still remains within him now years later, in some crusted blood on his cuticles. He doesn’t discredit that, but oh how he knows this is different. Maybe it didn’t begin as such, but by god how it has grown. He feels as if he has never loved so much before, feels he could never love someone more and somehow in spite of that, he knows he will love him impossibly more tomorrow. It’s love, yes, and it’s something entirely, incomprehensibly, breathtakingly different too. 

As every kind of love, even though it may not be not contained to emotion but existing through action too, the very feeling of it- that always comes tinged in grief. It is an anticipatory grief, in the awareness of what is to come and it is living in a constant state of bereavement, far before the bereavement does come. It is the threat of severing the tie and it is the threat of the truth, which is that no matter what he does the tie will always remain around his wrist, forever cutting off circulation and hanging limply at his side. The apprehension of that, he hasn't lost yet but he will lose and he misses them already, of that he fears times end but it will end and the time wasn’t enough. He thinks of what he will say when it comes, at a funeral or at the threshold of a door, and he finds the words already filling his mouth like blood from a broken tooth. He can swallow it down or it can spill from his lips, either way it will refill with everything he wishes to preemptively say, with the feeling of this imperative need to try and impart how much he loves before his chance is gone. Because it will go. 

To feel love is to feel the consequences of love before the punishment and to love is to ask not to be abandoned only to be abandoned anyway. A fundamental pillar of love is loss and it is not therefore a futile experience or effort, rather just that it is no more than an illusion of choice which is presented in the question of whether this means if it is better to have lost from love or not loved at all. There is no choice, there will always be love and there will always be loss. Knowing any of this does not change it nor does it make it hurt any less.

So yes, he loves Dylan, that is undeniable to him, always aware of it, tinged in anticipatory grief as it is. He can feel how the love he holds for Dylan is made all the exact same and even if he should try to measure it against any past love, as much as it may tip the scales immensely, they are both on the same scales regardless. However this feeling isn’t tinged with grief, it has permanence unable to be reached by it, it’s replaced the marrow of his bones. That then is not the love itself which is different, rather that it is something unique of its own. Certainly that means it has to be something else entirely, this feeling in him. 

It is an ineffable feeling. It is apperception, it is átopos, it is tacit knowledge, it is the explanatory gap, it is the noesis of the noema, it is the very problem of qualia. For every theory or piece of philosophy, for all the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, for if everything supervenes on the physical and it is no more than oxytocin in the limbic centers of the brain, to him it is no more than a linguistic mess. All this to simply put, he knows it is different because he feels that it is different, he knows it exists because he exists. Most importantly, he doesn’t care for the orthodoxy of philosophy on this because all he knows and all he knows to be true, is that this is something which can only be felt in these bones and in this mind, this ineffable, irreplicable, incomprehensible feeling.

His understanding of love no longer contains it. It is connected, intertwined, made of the same body and mind, but it is separately distinct. In its difference, perhaps it exists as the paradox of ineffability, to find meaning of what it then truly is. It is possible only as apophatic in nature, described by what it is not, supervening on the meaning of other words that cannot truly capture it. His very own self made differánce, a word in a state of becoming, self collapsing in an endless deferral of meaning. For if in its very essence, this is the raw feel, the what it’s like, the isolated, visceral, and untranslatable; then all of what he has left for language, is of what it is not but what does come of it. Through that, of what is expressed from it, he can find the name for which meaning is not inherent.

It is not reduced to the observable, to the smile that tugs at his lips when he sees him, the hand he reaches out without intention, the softening of his voice, the fading of his insomnia. It is not reduced to his volition, to emotion, to the behavioral, to the physiological, nor to the cognitive. It is an emergence that comes from the connection of all of them, returned to the subjective and descriptive, forced into metaphor as all language of understanding is entangled in. Ryan is not a religious man, he would not call it devotion. He is not blinded by devotion, he sees Dylan not as an ideal trapped within that rigid meaning, he is seen for all he is, all the perfect messiness of him. To be devoted would be to create the personification of the holy and in turn remove what makes him to be real. It would strip from him the blue ink splotches always staining his fingers, to the rambling way he speaks straying down every path in the forest before he reaches his point, to the constantly mismatched socks mussing up his leg hair, to the awkwardly tense jokes told at the absolute wrong time and even in concept it is a tragedy, Ryan never wishes to see him reduced from any of all of what he is.    

He thinks he thought of it right earlier. It feels nearer to resolution. There is a subtle distinction between the two and to him, it’s an incredibly important one. Resolution, to define this aftereffect, has meanings that stretch from its root like the branches of the oak and exists already in its own unstable nature. It means something to him, it means a lot to him. Most prominent of which it means to make a firm decision, such as how Ryan has promised himself to stay friends rather than risk casting aside this little bit of anything that he has with him. It means to be determined, such as how Ryan does not have to imagine Sisyphus happy, he gladly chooses to strive for the hilltop, relentless should he reach it or not. Then to the condition of which no further changes can occur, for as long as Ryan lives, to whatever comes after, he will come should Dylan just call. To the action of bringing harmony, which more than just the sensory binds Ryan to him like glue, it is where to speak and share a space with him feels like coming home to rest. At last, it even means an in depth examination of the details, of Dylan himself, where Ryan’s knowledge of him is as vast as it is insatiable, both his very desire to and an understanding itself of which neither have an end. 

With how each of these definitions make up the parts of the greater whole resolution, if any one of them were missing it would be sorely incomplete, as it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference. He is left with a becoming definition that is not simply unstable, but circular in its very nature. He defines the emergence as resolution, while defining it at all is by and of itself another resolution of belief in the existence of the emergence. This emergence which is from all of what there is, of that there is something it is like to feel this, this which is different from love, this which has no definition and cannot be defined. A circular, crumbling staircase of meaning where the floor has fallen through, never to be reached.

So no, of this emergence, devotion does not do it justice. Dylan is his resolution. He knows that it could be said he’s playing with semantics, that it is meaningless in that it only has meaning for him, something only he can know and understand. He is well aware that it remains isolated in that way, that it is still just as incommunicable as it began, that it is in a tangled web of language of which both he and it are trapped within. Fine, okay, he even understands that if this resolution outwardly exhibits no differently than love, then for it to be emergence and not just another component, means it must be acknowledged that it has to be the vines through the cracks of what his love is not enough to fill. He does not want to know if so, if it is a part of the chimera, if once more the difference is indeed the what is off. It could be any part, the separation between, mouth of cave, frozen ice sheet, melted droplets patter, iron barred cage, door creaking open, blood under claw and teeth filled animal, that is within.   

Somehow, the more he’s acknowledged any of it, the more the undefinable nature of the space between the difference and the meaning seems foreboding. The absence of anticipatory grief does not make it safe, he realises, it makes it haunted by the lack of it. He thinks, perhaps he needs it to be di- no, no he knows, he does, it is different and that is objective knowledge of the objectivity of this subjective truth and that’s it, nothing else more. He doesn’t care if that doesn’t make sense, he knows it anyway. And yet, still there is no resolution in naming the emergence of this feeling as resolution. 

The eeriness of that disquiets him. The enormity of it terrifies him. It rises up and sits in his throat. He does not know whether it is the words he cannot say or if it is the very thickness of his emotion choking him up. He doesn’t dare wonder if it is the blood of a broken tooth. He does not know, so he does not dare speak. He listens to the names of each constellation, through Cetus, to Eridanus, to Vela, until those upon the ceiling run out and the guiding hand falls softly to the blanket once more. A soft kind of silence falls over them, in the wake of one’s lilting tone and another’s ruminating thoughts. The only sound to be cared to notice now is the wind coming in from the window and rolling over into the gentle crashing waves against rock. In the moments following, he lets the enormity of his worthless acknowledgment and his futility to articulate it just dissolve from iron to salt on his tongue. With the spring-tides cresting by the delicate draw of the sun's force, the seas curl towards sky and stars and beneath it all, it is the feeling itself that quells the thoughts and considerations made squall into calmer waters.  

As he focuses again on the true feeling of it itself, rather than his own attempts to define it, he thinks he knows what really matters. That although he will never be able to truly speak it aloud, not even to himself, he still feels it within him, more tangible than any of the scents have ever been. He realises then, it is for that reason he knows he would not need words anyway. For more than the emergence of it, proof of the feeling itself will reside within him regardless, unspoken and without inherent meaning as it may be. 

All he has to do is try to draw marrow from his hip and instead find that the needle will fill with a thick sludge of honey in its place. Further, should he cut open his chest, past skin and muscle, it’s written there in a scrawling script around each of his ribs, in a spiral up to where his sternum is chiseled and chipped away. With his chest wall split in half and held apart by hand or retractor, there he would no longer need any word spoken. There anyone could see how the sun is carved in, with a golden inlay and shining light out, reaching each corner of the room until he is stitched back up. 

The acknowledgment of that fact completely settles him. Perhaps he will never be able to say it and certainly he will never need proof of the feeling, yet there it will always be. He has to endlessly carry it with him and he can never put it down, not because it is something cradled within his arms, but because it is as much a part of him as the atoms binding him together. One day those will be returned to the universe and one day the ineffable will diffuse with them, but just as they carry on so will it. When he is six feet under the earth, left to rot on the forest floor or drowned where the sediment settles in the dips of his skin wrapped over his bones, it will remain. As the worms, fungus and bacteria eat away his body there will be vestiges of Dylan still, from in his smallest bones will be the sound of his voice, to in his eyes will be the vision of him in the moonlight and to in his teeth will be all the words Ryan did not know how to say. It is inevitable that when what he once was becomes feasted by decomposition, the rot will too taste the ineffable feeling and in turn consume, grow, then return to the earth the resolution of that there was something it was like for him to feel this. 

It is that too which makes the acknowledgment of what emerges from it to be more than futile. More than just the vines that creep through the cracks of what his love is not enough to fill, the emergence of these vines at all means he must then understand that they are the whole which is more than the sum of its parts, that it is irreducible to them. This resolution is more than the ineffable and the ineffable is more than the resolution. It then doesn't matter that it will all slough away, including his bones where it is in the hollows that he keeps him, which one day will also finally give up their resistance, to be broken down to sand or dissolved amongst the salt to release sunlight through the deep dark. It emerged from them, yet it remains without them. Ryan is not a religious man and yet he knows, from atom to atom and dust to dust, with his own existence, now that this has been felt, it will always exist in the world. That which permeates and persists past silence and language. That is what truly matters and that is what the resolution of the ineffable is. Together it is permanence, all together it is the inevitable. That is what settles him, that all this attempt to grasp at gnosis and yet with his hands around it now, it’s so simple. All of this just so simply means that not everything feels like something else.            

So soothed over this time, that he has not felt the gradual piercing through his skin, the water soaking up through the mattress to swamp around him or the tightening grip of the hands until now. Not until the steel hook gives a hefty yank and as he is torn through the mattress, he feels his body fall. His eyes flinch shut, the muscles from his back, to his shoulders and down through to his arm all give a simultaneous jolt against the sensation, then within the very instant, it has already passed. While this familiar reflexive startle may have ripped out where the hook of sleep had caught in him, when he blinks his eyes open, he looks up from where he never left, amongst the sand and silt. The hands of sleep withdraw, fingers releasing their grasp and wrists slipping back through the sediment. His own hand curls a little tighter around the side of the leg within his palm, finger hooking into his shin bone, thumb swiping through leg hair, over his skin as if he can memorise each pore. He needs no anchor to stay down here, not here beneath the sun.   

Less of a shatter than before, Dylan breaks their peaceful quiet with a light laugh, “Okay? Tired?”

“Something like that.” Ryan mumbles back, feeling how the stream of sunlight sways through the sea in an echo of his laughter.

“You can sleep if you want to.” Dylan assures him again, however long later from the first time.

Ryan replies in no different essence. “I’m wide awake.”

The twilight outside may still linger on the edge of a nautical submersion of its own, however now down upon the seabed it feels that eons have gone by. Beneath a sun that has never set, from his body roots have grown, threaded outward through the sediment. At the bottom of the ocean an old growth forest has risen, trees emerging through the depths to sway in the currents, their leaves rolling in the sea foam of the waves high above. From his stomach this all grew, the root of each tree connected from where they came weaving between his intestines and punctured through the skin of his waist. Life does not grow within a freezing and endless void. It’s gone, completely. He hears his own sigh of relief, his lungs finally and fully emptying, all oxygen exhaled.

“I’m sorry.” Dylan blurts out suddenly. It’s louder than the hush they’d kept themselves at and his tone, slightly nervous and strained, is a shockwave that sends columns of bubbles curling upwards through the salt. 

Ryan lifts a brow and tilts his head towards him. “Huh?”

“I’m sorry I feel like I uh, misspoke earlier? And that I, well, possibly upset you?” With eyes now turned to him, Dylan fingers flutter from the string to the fabric at the neck of his hoodie, with a slight tug before he forces them to return. Ryan tracks the movement, sees the desire to hide as he speaks.  

Both of his brows dip now and he sounds a little dumb even to himself, as in his genuine confusion he has nothing more to ask again than, “What?”

“Earlier, when I said something like, ‘name-name’ versus like, ‘werewolf name’, or something? Um. Remember?” Dylan imitates himself and scrunches his face as he tries to find the words to explain.

“What? No, no dude, you didn’t upset me. I don- Don’t worry about it.” Ryan says groggily and blinks his eyes again in an attempt to wake his mind enough from its dreamlike abstraction to a grounded process that may be able to make the connection he is missing.  

“I did though. And I know I did, so.” Dylan says and then with a shaken head, he cuts off another attempt at a confused and now nervous-leaning reassurance from Ryan. “No, no I know I did, okay I felt it. In your scent, undeniable. It was like I sprayed pesticides and made the fucking forest start withering, okay? I single handedly caused climate change and G- no, sorry, I’m being serious, I am. So let me just- I don’t know, reword it? ‘Cause now I think I know what it sounded like to you and that’s not what I meant.”

A little stunned and still in a souped up haze that is fading at a stubborn rate, Ryan just nods. He does not truly wish Dylan to continue- he does not want to hear him speak of what he knows Ryan to be, someone with something a little off within him, someone who became what they always were. He did not want Dylan to have picked up on his thoughts, that acknowledgement of himself. He told himself it didn’t hurt, why would Dylan bring it up now with this assurance to it like it had?   

“I just meant that- yeah, I meant everything I said but at the end there, I just…” He sucks a breath in and blows it back out through his teeth, sitting up a little and psyching himself up before he continues. “Guess I’m sorry that I’m like this constant reminder of it.”

Ryan sticks his left elbow beneath him to prop himself up on his side, to meet Dylan’s eyes at his new level, so relieved at the misunderstanding that he doesn’t even catch himself as he admits, “That is so far from how I see you.”   

Dylan just shakes his head and continues to try explaining what Ryan already plainly knows to not be true. “Okay. Well, no, I know that, what I meant is that- god okay, maybe I don’t know. I know it's not just that, but more like, I wish that we could have, y’know, had this without me ruining it by waking up from a stupid nightmare. I guess what I meant when I said that, was that I just feel like you’d like me a lot more without all this hanging over us? I swear I was like twenty percent more put together before this, which I know isn’t a massive improvement, but-”

“Dylan, I like you just fine.” Ryan says, a little thrown, but confident in this. His thumb gently presses in against his muscle as he continues, trying not to minimise the feeling while remaining quite confused at the logic, or lack thereof. “With nightmares, without them, doesn’t change a thing to me. I mean, seriously, why- how could it?”

“Okay. Yeah, okay.” There’s a pause. Dylan flicks his eyes up to just shy of Ryan’s cheekbone. “Ryan? Uh. This sounds so st- Nevermind, just- Do you like me? Like, y’know, like me like that, I mean. Uh, because I don’t k-”

“I don’t!” Ryan repeats instantly, all he heard and all he can hurriedly echo. He chokes on the saltwater that’s filled his lungs, coughing from the suddenly prominent burn and he forces himself to keep going through it, speaking before his stomach has even finished its plummet. “No! I’m so sorry, I don’t like you, not like that, I am- I’m sorry if I- god that I made you feel unco- or feel like I’m- no, I’m so sorry, uh- shit, um.”

The sea freezes over. It spreads through the saltwater and forest with the devastation of a fire, as a single ice crystal drifts down from a toiling storm to land atop the waves crest. It rapidly grows in a flash freeze, encasing the top of the ocean, holding the waves in place mid curl, the foam evaporating and loose droplets falling to the iced over surface like glass beads dropped to a porcelain floor. It expands downwards in a finger of death, an ice stalactite that sends spires outward through the water and it creeps towards him until Ryan feels his stomach pierced. There along the roots from his stomach it spreads, each crystal eviscerating the forest from inside out, the moss over the seabed transformed to razor sharp crystals, the leaves ruptured from within. The sun above the ocean is no more than a blurry halo of light through the thick ice, the space between them now opaque and scattering the light. No longer does its warmth pass through the tide, no longer does its beams ripple in the currents, no longer does it reach him on the frozen seabed. 

Dylan blinks, once, twice, maybe a few times in quick succession. Ryan isn’t sure, he can’t really meet his eyes. Still he hears the short laugh, a violent sound, more of an exhale in a forceful burst, accompanied by a visible recoil of his chest as it contracts from the punch of the sound. “Right. No, ‘course, sorry, that was so fucking stupid. Um. Wow. I’m sorry.”

Ryan grinds his jaw to the side and he swears he feels a tooth break. His tongue tastes of blood and salt and a cough lingers in the back of throat and still he remains silent. He says nothing as Dylan lifts his hands from fur and drawstring, placed at his sides as he awkwardly shifts around and stabilizes himself. Ryan neither lets go nor tightens his grip, as Dylan withdraws his leg back to himself and tucks it beneath him, Ryan’s fingers grazing along to the bottom of his achilles tendon until they flex around nothing but air. His hand left empty, feels cold in the wake of the warmth he clutched in his palm. His lungs remain just as empty too, unable to draw in a breath to turn to sound. Slowly, he also pushes himself back to sit upright, eyes pointed to the indent of his knees. There are so many things he can say, that he wishes to say, and none of them would be another lie. He does not dare speak.

Dylan laughs again and there’s no humour in it, it sounds nearer to the gurgle of lungs filled with blood, shredded to ribbons by crystals of ice. “No saving that one, huh? Jesus. Probably rate it the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said and I think uh, almost anything I say is at least a strong seventy percent high on the embarrassment scale, so. World record maybe?”

Ryan nearly cringes at the sound of it. He hates to leave Dylan stewing in the perceived embarrassment, but what other choice does he have? If he says anything to assure him otherwise, he will be admitting to what Dylan was just telling him he does not feel the same as. Worse than that actually, far worse, he would be admitting to being in love with him. He would be admitting to the resolution, to the ineffable, to the inevitable. Some needless, momentary embarrassment is a little bit awkward, while loving past a point he can even put words to will ruin the friendship irreparably. It’s not a rock and a hard place when the answer there is so clear. 

The best he has to offer in an attempt otherwise, is weak to even his own ears. “I walked around with my shirt inside out the other day?”

“Oh, yeah you totally got me beat, man. Phew, don’t know how I’d recover from that one.” Dylan says, with his tone so breezy that Ryan knows instantly what he will see if he looks up. He knows and he cannot stop himself from flicking his eyes upward anyway. 

Dylan's face has shuttered. He has fastened the straps of his mask around his head until the edges of it merge into his skin beneath. He has this lopsided smile and leans back on his hands, just the picture of carelessness, unphased by anything. There is not a twitch to his expression, not a flicker of fidgeting movement to his hands, not a betraying tightness to his grin. Picture of carelessness had he not just both physically withdrawn, limbs kept tight to his body, and emotionally withdrawn, all vulnerability tucked beneath the mask. Both equally pulled from Ryan's grasp. It is the opposite of genuine relief and as well as it hides him, Ryan finds himself looking right through it anyway. Dylan looks right back, eyes meeting his completely steady. Still, there is no connection or meaning in eye contact with so much between them, as Ryan looks out from the mouth of a cave, through a sheet of ice and Dylan looks out from behind the mask, through the porcelain mould. Suddenly there is a frozen ocean and entire atmosphere between them. Neither of them are who they said they would be, neither of them are who they wish the other to be. Werewolf-Ryan and Blasé-Dylan look each other in the eyes and it is empty.  

Not only has the ocean frozen over, not only has he fled behind the safety of the mask, but the room near instantly becomes bitter sharp. It is Dylan’s scent and it isn’t. It is near unrecognisable, far from the burnt sweetness of earlier, instead it is almost scentless in a contradictory way. Ryan over the past months has become very accustomed to the scents, to their subtle shifts, to their presence, to the tangible emotion in them, from clearly noticeable to present yet unnameable. This is unlike anything he has past experienced. It is not embarrassment it reeks of as would be expected. It is a sting, serrated and metallic. It smothers all else in the room, an invisible gaseous smog made of needlelike spikes, it is perceptible only in the numbing sensation of frostbite crawling up the bridge of his nose and the sudden lack of all other scents, as if the woven wind has been consumed by it. The wisps of woodsmoke, tendrils of white ash and threads beaded with dewdrops are completely gone and for the first time in four months, Ryan finds himself truly deprived of one of senses. It is disconcerting and disturbing, something he never thought he would experience again and now that he has, he feels immediately agitated from it.                  

For as much as he can see through it, Ryan would believe the mask was fitted in place to save from embarrassment, he’d believe that. Ryan hates to see it slotted over his face, let alone be the cause of its appearance, but he does not hate Blasé Dylan. Blasé Dylan exists for a very specific purpose and that is namely to protect himself. To shield himself against embarrassment, sure, it would make sense. Ryan almost desperately wants it to be as simple as that. It isn’t. That’s how Ryan knows he has really fucked up. Clearly, it is not just some momentary embarrassment. Ryan has never been a good liar and that was the boldest, most fear filled lie he has ever spoken. He knows. Everything that Ryan has tried to hide and still he’s given it away, still Dylan knows. Fuck. What was it, what did he say? What has he done? 

Ryan looks away first. “I’m sorry.” He says and he means it. 

“It’s fine man, I shouldn’t have asked. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, right?” Dylan says back and Ryan can tell he means it too. 

“Right.” Comes the echo.

He doesn’t know what to do, what to say. His mind feels almost blank. Wordless, thoughtless, nearly emotionless. This shouldn’t hurt, it’s not new information. Kaitlyn told him herself, Dylan wasn’t interested, why would it hurt anymore having that reiterated? If anything it is better confirmation, to hear it from his own mouth. That doesn’t hurt, that’s fine. Maybe what hurts is that it won’t change anything for him. It’s not some closure or release from his feelings, no. It’ll remain. Ryan, for all the good it’s worth, knows himself. Knows this about himself at the very least. He knows for as short a time that he’s lived, this will remain for as long a time he has left and to the after when he’s gone. He may be young but he just knows, resolute in it, that it is different, it is unique, it is irreplicable, it is unchangeable. He’s it for him, he’ll always be it for him, it is him, solely him. This doesn’t change anything for Ryan.

He’s had one objective in mind, one resolute promise to himself, that he couldn’t stop himself from breaking. It’s pathetic really. He knew what would happen and he let it happen anyway. It was the very first month they returned to the quarry, the very first night. His stomach dropped and he promised himself that he would not ruin their friendship over unrequited feelings. That he could be normal, could be the friend that Dylan deserves. He should have been able to contain it, swallow it down and forget it exists.  

For Dylan however, with the frozen ocean, sun without warmth, frostbite scent smothering all others, it’s clear that it does change things. Yeah, if there’s one thing he’s completely assured of, it’s that he knows Dylan. Maybe not his whole life story or every interesting tidbit about him, but he can read him, he understands him, he sees him. Ryan understands this too. Dylan said that Ryan has never hurt him and God, what a lie that was. What a heartfelt, fundamental misunderstanding of what Ryan is, a selfish and deceitful man. He not only broke his trust harbouring his love and resolution, the ineffable and inevitable from him, but then to top it off, he lied right to his face when graciously given the chance to come clean about it. Ryan has never felt so selfish in loving someone before, he didn’t know loving someone could even be such a selfish act. He understands, he does. God if he hasn’t been yanked from a mind leeching dreams into thoughts and into a nightmare reality at a disorienting rate though. One of his own making worst of all, no one to blame but himself.   

Inevitable, inevitable, inevitable. That’s what it all is. Inevitable that he could not keep this something ‘off’ within him from ripping scratches into his limbs until he pulls away, inevitable that the something off within him keeps the blood he’s drawn under its claws, inevitable that he buries it so deep within him that it’ll remain until he is scattered to atoms. He thought maybe this something ‘off’ within him wasn’t malicious, just, y’know, a bit off, that’s all. When he was a little younger he contrasted it against a lack of empathy or antisocial behaviours. He kept to himself mostly, never minded being alone, he had that separation from others and when he latched on to someone, he never let them go from within him. However he never hurt little animals, he cares about others, he doesn’t have an inflated ego and he felt regret, even for simple things, like when he stole Ben Wilkinson’s NatGeo book- actually, he still feels bad about that, it’s a good book, he’s kept it on his bookshelf to this day. He’s always been a bit off, but he wasn’t bad. Yeah, well, he’s reconsidering.

Considering how that was all before he held a shotgun in his hands and pulled the trigger. Before he was a murderer, a murderer of someone who cared about him no less, someone who was kind and good and Ryan killed him. There was already blood on his hands from childhood and no amount of his hesitation meant anything when he willfully added more. He could have just not pulled the trigger. He thought about it and still he chose to do it, he made that decision, another nightmare of his own making. It is impossible to know what would have happened if he hadn’t shot, but Chris would be alive, he would. Ryan wouldn’t look in the mirror and see his own reflection as a mere smudge, something half drenched in blood and something half so bright it blinds him, a reflection of not him as he is, rather another form of him, of all the good he could have been. The good without the rot, the good without the blood, the good without death guiding his hand. Yeah, maybe his hands wouldn’t be clean even so, but they wouldn’t drip splatters of blood to the ground, leaving a trail behind him as he walks.  

With all of that, for him to think even for just a moment it’s possible that this something within him isn’t disgusting? Isn’t reprehensible and cruel and capable of evil, that’s- that is naive at best and proof of it at worst. No, it wasn’t the curse that made him possessive or selfish or off. Born with something rotten inside of him that has festered as he’s aged, has he ever tried to stop it? He used bloodshed to end bloodshed and now the stains pile on his hands in layers and layers and they will never be clean again. He doesn’t believe in fate, he doesn’t, his choices are his own. He could have changed this, any of this, from age seven to nineteen, yet again and again his choices have resulted in death. With that in him, with that being him, then of course it’s contaminated his love too. How could it not? No, he knew what it was, that it’s bloody hands, it’s flesh beneath his claws, it’s sinking them in and dragging them through skin until it breaks, it’s possessive, obstinate, violent even, like a dog with a bone. And he loved and he loves anyway. It’s disgusting, selfish, pathetic and condemned by its very own nature. And the accolades keep piling up in his mind and more and more he understands the withdrawal from him. Yes, he always was what he became and Ryan would keep a frozen ocean’s worth of ice away from himself too. He should probably just be glad the saltwater froze, instead of becoming an ocean’s worth of the blood he’s spilt, drowning him beneath the copper taste of his selfishness and crushing him beneath the weight of his choices. He understands what Dylan feels, he feels the same. His very own sense of love disgusts and scares him too.

“I- You know, I think I’m going to go have a shower. Uh, so- well. I might be a minute. Shit, your drive’s pretty long, right? I won’t hold you hostage, um, don’t feel like you have to wait around or anything. You can head off whenever, no worries.” Dylan tells him and it’d be pretty believably genuine, if it wasn’t so obviously not. Props to him, it’s such a polite boot out the house that even a Southern grandma would be impressed. 

“Right, yeah, should probably get going.” Ryan agrees. He keeps all his regret and reluctance from his words. It’s the least he can do. 

“Oh, ‘course, sure.” Dylan says, feigning surprise like that wasn’t what he had subtly asked for. “‘Suppose I’ll say bye now then? Thank you for all the help, seriously man, really- uh, really good of you. Thanks.”

“Anytime, y’know?” That he has to still know. And this, well, this is for his own selfish sake. “I was happy to. You uh, need a ride to the quarry, this time coming up? Happy to do so. Uh, same as, anytime.”

“Oh, no, no it’s alright, thanks though. I mean, might take you up on it eventually, but I’ll hitch a ride with- this time I’ll be alright.” He smidges a little over to the top of the duvet, earning an unimpressed meow as he shuffles down the bed away from them. “Guess I’ll see you then?”

“Right, right. Uh, see you then.” Ryan forces out.

Dylan nods, probably to himself more than anything, pushes himself to the end of the bed and hops up. Ryan doesn’t know what he’s meant to do, so he just sits there while Dylan roots through his closet for clothes. He just stares at his knees. Listens to the sound of rummaging. Hooks his hands around his own shin to replace the lost weight in his palm. Tries to not to freak out from the deprivation of his primary sense. Then there’s a thud on the bed by his feet. He glances up, first to the box at the edge of the mattress and then slower, hesitantly, back to Dylan again. 

“It’s the first today. Could be the start of winter, considering.” Dylan tells him, hesitating with a little nod down to the box and that clicks it together.

“Yeah, ‘suppose meteorologically. Feels it already.” Ryan talks around it as if the box is invisible, the same way as when he’s at his grandparents house and politely tries his best to pretend not to see the money in the birthday card until he’s read it through. No matter how much he avoids acknowledging the box with anything close to even a glance, it’s the fact they’ve suddenly been reduced to talking about the weather that is nearly physically painful.  

“Well…” Dylan does a start and stop, catching and forcing himself to acknowledge what Ryan said. He runs his hands over his upper arms, barely nodding an agreement so he can push through until he’s able to flee. “Um, well. First of the month today. Start of wint- ah, it’s your birthday. In four days. Five, counting today. Pretty sure you know that. Hopefully. Um, listen, this is- it’s really stupid and lame and now I’m thinking it might be uh, kinda bad taste. I mean, honestly some Reese's or something may have been better, but. Uh, I’ll tell you this, for all my many super cool and crazy talents, gift giving is not really one of them, so.”

He picks it up again and does a very gentle toss of it over to him, landing a little tilted on the angle of the duvet lifted by his knees. Ryan steadies it with a hand and doesn’t really look at it. “Uh, totally unnecessary dude, thank you, I really wasn-”

“Don’t open it yet!” Dylan blurts out, cutting him off. He clears his throat a little and makes himself sound much more composed. “Uh, that is a birthday present. And birthday presents are a birthday only privilege, by law, okay? That’s codified and everything, so just- yeah. You’ve got a few hours left. Open it up on your birthday.”

“Yeah, ‘course, ‘course. Thank you.” Ryan’s glad to agree. His reasons are selfish and, well, a little less selfish. Selfishly, he doesn’t know what his reaction will be, he can’t even look at it as right now it could be a fridge magnet and he still wouldn’t trust his tear ducts. Only slightly less selfishly, it’s also so clear that Dylan wants to get out of here as soon as possible. He’s injecting little laughs between his words and guising his discomfort beneath a playful tone, but for Christsake, he’s just repeating scripted lines that are thrown off by no more than a comment on the changing seasons. If Ryan had to guess he’d say Dylan doesn’t want to give him a present at all anymore, let alone be forced to linger in his company or sit through him opening the wasted effort. Ryan’s fingertips burn atop the varnish. 

“Cool, cool, cool. Uh well, I’m off. Have a good birthday man.” Dylan sends him a short pawed wave, aborted halfway through. He’s turned his back and started for the door before he would have caught the returned loosely given two finger salute Ryan sent back. He doesn’t blame him.

He hears the footfalls stop and he feels the barbs of the scent turned ice grow impossibly sharper for a second. He can’t stop himself from glancing up to the door where Dylan has paused. His back still turned, he shakes his head to himself, this nearly imperceivable gesture. His spine arches beneath the fabric of his hoodie as he draws in a deep breath and turns around again, his eyes locking to Ryan’s before he can shift his gaze. He opens his mouth as if to speak and closes it again. A second ticks past, a second too long that it is unbearable. 

Ryan’s jaw grinds left again, his mouth opens of its own accord and it feels like he’s throwing up as he says, “I want you to know- I want you know that I’m- But I want to- I hope you’re- and I’m- I’m sorry.” 

Dylan doesn’t say anything in response to the nonsensical auditory bile and it hangs in the air sounding stupider and stupider with each second past. Then he just smiles. He just smiles.              

It isn’t real, mostly. Still, there’s something genuine in there, a little, maybe. It’s something, at least. It's anything. Ryan will always take this little bit of anything that he has with him, over the everything of anyone else. He returns the smile as best he can, of course he does, incessantly compelled to by the mere sight of it. It’s not the same, he’s aware. The difference is, Dylan’s lips curl up and it isn’t mostly real but it is the most Dylan part of Dylan, and it isn’t warm but it is no less radiant. Difference is, Ryan’s lips split open and it isn’t just the strings of blood dragged between them but it is the uncovering of fangs broken off in the hope it may resemble teeth; and it isn’t just the blood diluted saltwater gurgling past his lips into rivulets trickling down his chin but it is the overflowing of it all, from the exposed pulp of his teeth, to his bitten tongue, to the scratches left inside his throat of every word he gnaws on before swallowing down. 

A beat passes. The door creaks and the staircase groans and ever so faintly there’s murmurs beneath the linoleum squeaks. Ryan drops his face into his hands. He runs a tongue over his teeth as if to check they really aren’t cracked and just finds his gums feeling raw instead. Yeah, that’s the difference between them and what will always be the difference between them. Dylan covers himself with a porcelain mask, polished and unblemished, without a single crack or chip. With a smile and a laugh and a joke at the ready, no matter the situation or emotion. This spans to even when the jokes do crack in the kiln of a petrifying fear, the porcelain of the mask melting in a sludge of magma over him, cooling and recrystallizing, instantly sculpting him to marble. Either way, this mask, he can paint it on himself so finely, in the like of something he is just not quite. With brushes dipped in a colour that brightens the cold stone and glossed over every little fissure, so not a single pore could bring shame or offence. Well, for all that he can blend himself to it until no one seems able to see it isn’t really him, not all of him, not the skin of him; Ryan has seen the shivering, it must be cold, this molded, painted, smoothed over veneer. It’s a thin layer of skin over his own or it’s a coat of paint over marble. Either way, when he retreats beneath it, he keeps himself hidden in the dark. It’s not a good thing, Ryan doesn’t think that in the slightest, it’s just- the thing is, he can take it off.

Ryan has never managed to craft something as delicate as porcelain into a mask, nor steady his hands to paint with such detail. It’s not like he wears his heart on his sleeve, instead it’s that he is nothing so polished. He is always this rawly himself, he’s never known how to stop, how to stop it escaping out from behind bars, out from the cave within. Always, he feels flayed. He speaks to the people he cares about and it doesn’t just make his skin crawl, it makes it shredded, it carves it from him, and somehow- it’s- and he’s not- he- for fucksake. He talks to the people he cares about and he doesn’t know if they’re holding the knife or if he has turned his own claws against himself. Not like it matters. He's always left spilling out his entrails and grasping out his mangled hands either way. He walks away, this skinned carcass that has pulled itself from the hook, still hot to the touch, seeping out, all bloody muscle and corded sinew and oozing pus. He knows that neither ice nor cage has ever contained it at all and he always knew it and it leaves him flayed. 

He’s tried to drag himself off to the corners, to solitude no different than a dog hiding beneath the porch to die alone, only he hasn’t died. He’s still here, has survived everything life has tried him with yet and while he thinks of death constantly, knows it with a vile intimacy, he doesn’t think of his own. He just ends up coming crawling out from beneath the porch, always, for all he’s tried. Ryan is a cruel and selfish bastard, he never lets go, he tries, he swears, he really has tried. He only has three photos. He hasn’t watched a single DVD. He doesn’t even say his goddamn fucking name. He keeps his eyes from the scar. He stays out of the office. He’s dropped the painting in the gap behind the bench’s seatback. On and on and on he tries and still he never does let go and still he never will. He sinks his claws in and on and on and on he clings to limbs, until they’re the ones who are forced to rip lacerations into themselves pulling free. He keeps his claws bloodsoaked and on and on and on he clings to his love for them, long after they’re gone. He thinks his desperate and clinging and needlessly grief stricken attempts at love must be horrifying to witness. People have to notice it and it has to be a revolting sight, to see this flayed man or this skinned animal.

Something like panic begins to claw at his throat, that disgusting flayed beast howling in this chant, that he tried so hard, he can’t lose this, he can’t lose him, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t. He shuts it down instantly. Then Ryan starts to seethe. 

He can’t lose this, he can’t? Well he is, he already has, because he couldn’t be fucking normal for just once! Just once in his entire life and he couldn’t even manage that. His word means absolutely nothing, the promises he crushes like snails beneath a brick. It’s not even some werewolf bullshit he can blame this on, this is him, this all him. He always what was he fucking became. What was it, what gave him away- what, that he couldn’t let go of his leg? Clinging and clinging to it, that’s pathetic in the most humiliating and demeaning sense of the word. God, or- or what? What, was it all those lovesick glances and slips of the tongue, as if he really couldn’t help himself? He’s acted as if he wanted this to happen, as if he wanted him to see this skinless clawed thing, as if anyone wouldn’t recoil at the sight of it. Or was this his scent, giving him away this whole time, fuck, why couldn’t he stay away? Selfishly indulging over and over. And- and still he has the godforsaken gall to think he knows best, knows what is right for not just Dylan, for anyone- and he does, he does still think that. No, of course this hasn’t changed anything for him, of course not. Not a waver to his resolution, not one. He’ll crawl under the porch like a dog to its death and he’ll lick his raw exposed flesh wounds and he’ll come crawling right back out again. He is sick, he is rotten inside, flayed skin and rot within.

That’s when the resignation sets back in. His attempts at self loathing are worthless if he doesn’t change anything. There’s no dignity in his anger when he already knows it won’t. He’ll come crawling right back out again because for however much that Ryan could never say it, he hates to feel alone. He likes his own space, his own time, his own company, needs his peace and quiet where he can keep to himself. It’s not to be alone, it’s to feel alone. It’s that- that feeling inside of him and like the ineffable he would never be able to speak aloud what it is, but unlike it, he thinks he can name exactly what it is. It’s- He gets lonely. He gets sick with it.    

That sickness it’s- behind his eyes in an instant, a memory bubbles up from the depths, somewhere forgotten and left to rot with the rest of it, of a time when he was a kid. Must have been, what, maybe nine or so? Back staying at his Mom’s, when he watched Hostel for the first time. He doesn’t know where she was, evidently not around to tell him not to watch it at least. It was his first big kid horror movie and he spent the majority of it peeking through his hands, both horrified and unable to look away. Until it got to the scene where the main character is strapped to a chair, gets his achilles tendon sliced and then stands up, splitting it open in a snap. Ryan truly couldn’t stomach it, he had to avert his eyes. Before though, it’s that short moment before that which this memory centers on. It’s how he cringed, a wince and shudder and recoil, which forced the turn of his head. It was a reflex from his visceral aversion and revulsion to what he was seeing and honestly, Ryan to this day cringes at the thought of it again. Yeah, that’s what it is. It’s the same response to hearing the sound of the crunch, in one of those early internet videos. The handheld capture of someone sitting with their feet atop a coffee table, until a kid jumps off a trampoline and comes right down onto their outstretched legs. With that memory for reference, he knows exactly what it’s like, more than a movie or recording, he had known it intimately the past few months. It’s the bend, snap and crunch.

There’s just something sick about it. It’s something specifically sick about it too, unlike a firehose of fake blood sprayed over a theatre or some other impressive practical effects. When it comes to bones and tendons, it’s this gut-deep cringing response, a genuine physiological reaction to seeing and hearing something be broken that never should. That is what he feels of himself, of his loneliness, this desperate and disgusting thing. He thinks that is what he evokes in others too, if not immediately than inevitably. That’s what he thinks it feels like, so it’s what, what like this flayed and clinging ‘off’ thing within him walks on bones snapping beneath his own weight, tearing open his own tendons with each step? God. Yeah, it is, he can picture it pretty bloody vividly. He can’t paint himself another layer to his own skin but if he nailed the stylus to his hand, given some time he could give image and movement to it all. He’d barely get to show it off before it was banned for objectionable obscenity. 

He should go, fuck, he should just go. He needs to get out of here. He drops his hands from his face and sets them down beside him to push himself up. There’s a loud merp before he manages to do so. He glances to his side and Dinger stands up, disturbed by the series of dips in the mattress beneath her. His chest gives a short and violent tug inward, the air going to the back of his throat, as if preparing and stopping short of a sob that was never going to come. He breathes silent and even and still he firmly blinks his eyes as Dinger smudges her cheek against his elbow, despite how they’re completely dry. He doesn’t know why his body feels as if it is on the precipice of tears when he genuinely feels no need or want to cry. Maybe it’s just that he likely lost a friend and yet still gained another, he thinks to himself, lifting his hand to hold a hooked finger out for her. Maybe it’s the way that in her smoodging against it, with how her little fang glides over his skin, it catches his skin on the way back down. He tilts his hand as a small bead of blood wells from the pinprick, to keep it from staining her fur while he gives a scritch to the incredibly soft spot behind her ears. She resumes her fang filled smoodging against his wrist, endlessly pleased at the attention. 

“We’re not so different, huh?” He says, swallowing past the lump in his throat to smile at her. She doesn’t reply, obviously. He thinks if she could, she’d tell him that while they both have fangs and claws that make the people they care about bleed when they try to show their love, she hasn’t killed anyone. She proved her mercy when she didn’t suffocate him last night as was warned. He whispers to her as she begins to purr. “Yeah. I really didn’t mean to- didn’t want to, though. I really have tried. Hey kitty? Would you believe that? Thought cats were good at judging that sort of thing.”

To that she’d probably not say anything and just meow because she’s a fucking cat and Ryan is making up an imaginary conversation with her that should land him in an involuntary hold. When he’s resorted to assuaging his guilt through asking a literal animal, then he thinks the answer to his questions has to already be pretty damning. She’s just a good cat and he’s well, definitely not. He smooths his hand down her cheek and neck, letting her walk along to graze her teeth along his elbow again before she circles back, purring all the way. 

“Hey cat. Seem to like me anyway, don’t you? Not a very good judge of character, but we’re friends anyway, huh? Yeah?” Yeah, the answer must be, her fang catching now on his wrist. With one last scritch, he withdraws his hand and pushes himself off the bed. He whispers his apologies at her disappointed ceasing of purrs. “Sorry girl.” 

He gathers his things quickly. He has to, he has to get out of here quickly, while he can bring himself to. Tugs on his cargos, stuffs on his boots without lacing them, shoves his phone in his pocket and checks his keychain is still attached to the carabiner on his belt loop. He pauses when he grabs his hoodie from atop the duvet. He decides to leave it, how forgetful of him. He swipes his jacket from the back of the desk chair instead and pulls that on, patting himself down just in case he managed to forget something. He finally glances at the box on the bed. It’s about a shoulder width long and every visible inch is covered in a varnished collage. As he finally really looks at it, he can tell instantly that it was hand done by Dylan himself. It’s a coat of what ranges from newspaper headlines, to stills from kids horror shows, to stills of constellations, to print outs of book covers and various cryptids. He picks it up without looking at it again.

He’s set, well, other than the hoodie. He nods to Dinger, where she sits watching his movement around the room. He relents, walking back to give her one last scritch and one last chance to smoodge his hand. “Won’t probably see you again, yeah? So, gift to you. And him, but don’t tell him that, yeah? Good cat.”

With that, he stiffly forces himself to straighten, turn, step, one, two, three, four. He walks out through the door and does a short sideways jog down the stairs. He makes it halfway through the living room before he’s pulled up short, just another four steps from the door. Nadia pauses on the edge of the kitchen, a coffee in hand. “Everyone’s up early today it seems. Morning Ryan.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, probably best for me to- it’s a long drive so, should probably head out. Thank you though, for having me, thanks.” Ryan stumbles through, edging towards the door. He should really go now. Right now.

She tilts her head a little and gives this unexpectedly and strangely warm and almost- sad? She gives this smile as she looks at him and he doesn’t know what it means. “Totally understandable. I was just about to get the paper, I’ll walk you out and see you off.”

The way she says that- she wants to say something to him, clearly. God, does even she know? Did she work it out herself or were the murmurs hidden beneath the linoleum squeaks Dylan telling her? Or is Ryan seriously about to get told off for something he didn’t do? He didn’t even think about it! He just nods. They head out the door and Ryan hovers by the cab of his truck while she wanders on down to the mailbox. He can feel how he stands pinstraight, drawn tight like a bowstring, but he has no idea how to make himself physically relax. He worries his skin would slough off if he managed it, anyway.

As Nadia wanders back up the short driveway, he has to actively remind himself to breathe, wouldn’t really suit his hasty escape to pass out on the concrete and get dragged back inside due to his dramatics. So he breathes and waits patiently while Nadia appraises the first few pages of the newspaper. It isn’t as long a wait as it feels before she makes a triumphant sound and flips the page to face Ryan. His eyes drop down to where her finger taps against it, a steady tap tap tap beneath the bold inked heading. ‘The Horror’s Over’, Camp Counsellors Finally Returned Home After Massacre. Ryan swallows thickly at the title presented to him, sparing a quick glance down at the short piece beneath it, seeking out a specific name from the end. However, the author’s name is one Ryan has never seen before. Uncertain of where this may lead, nervously he forces his eyes to meet hers once more to find out. 

She gives him a small but kind and most importantly, seemingly genuine smile. She turns it back to herself, drawing her head back slightly to look down her nose at it, in a gesture that betrays the glasses she would usually wear when sizing up the paper like this. “Shot and a miss with the title if you ask me, which notably, they did not. You are heading home however and I promise I won’t keep you long, I know your parents must be eager to have you home. I just wanted to quickly say again, we are so appreciative of your help and one thing, if you don’t mind.”

Ryan doesn’t correct her, just nods along politely, as he was taught. She seems to pick up on what he didn’t say regardless, somehow. He watches as she folds the paper in her hands and fixes him with this flicking look, an assessment if he’s ever seen one. “Ah. Well, I was going to ask you to look after my boy, but…” But you just threw away your friendship with him and now neither of us trust you nor would ever want you to do so, Ryan fills in the blanks before she needs to speak them herself.

“But I know you already do- that night and even now, you look out for all of them. Now, I know as much about you as Dylan does, likely some things more than him in fact, yet I don’t know who looks out for you anymore. And I do not mean to overstep,” She tells him, contradicting herself as she does actually take a physical step closer, “However I must tell you this and I ask you to set Dylan aside completely here.” 

Ryan just barely resists closing his eyes in resignation and manages instead a solemn and once again polite nod of his head. Two streams of thought pass through what has slowly turned into the otherwise hazy valleys of mind. The thought that, of course she knows of that night, yet the acknowledgement of what he has been trying and failing to do, is kind at least. Even if she doesn’t know the half of it, the half that is filled with his complete failure after failure. A heartfelt compliment before the critique. As clearly, she has sized him up and found him lacking, to ask him to set Dylan aside. That’s where the second stream comes in from the sea to intersect the first, the thought that this is another person he will inevitably fail. Maybe in the next moment she will ask him to promise that he will do as she just asked and maybe in the next moment he will make that promise. It will be another, that try as may indeed, he will not maintain. To set Dylan aside is the true impossible task and for as much as either she or Dylan know him, if they do not know this, then they know nothing of significance. 

“I ask you to set him aside for this because it is really important to me that you truly understand, it does not matter what happens between you. It does not matter if one day you find yourself at odds, if you both end up heartbroken, if you think he hates you or if you think you can no longer be friends after this, just anything at all.” She spreads her hands apart to give emphasis as she looks at him very seriously. “Okay? Dylan aside completely, I need you to know that, nevermind should you want or need it, no matter what there will always be a hand and a home for you here. If you ever need somewhere to stay, if you ever need some help, if you ever need anything at all, you can call me.”

With that, from the bun in her hair she pulls a pen and tears a piece of the newspaper off, jotting down her number and handing it to Ryan. She asks him if he understands and Ryan wants to nod or say yes or really anything in the affirmative, if even just to make his escape come sooner. He can’t. He truly doesn’t understand. She can tell too, that much is obvious and she offers him another one of those smiles that makes something ache in Ryan’s chest.

“You don’t deserve empty words, Ryan, so please give me the benefit of the doubt in that I would not offer them. You went through something no one ever should and then and now, you looked out for the people around you. You’re a good kid and you are doing what a lot of people couldn’t. Still, it would make me feel a hell of a lot better to know that you had someone to look out for you too.” She tells him, looking him in the eye as she does so. “You don’t ever have to call, but I hope you understand that you are able to, for whatever reason. This is my home and I get the final say, so when I tell you that you will never be intruding here, I mean it. Anything that is within my power to help too, I want to. You don’t have to accept it, but you do understand that?”

Maybe it is just from the shock of the direction this went, a far north of anything he was ever expecting, but somehow, he does. Ryan swallows thickly again and despite the tightness in his chest from this necrotic hole drilling deeper in with each of her words, he nods and tells her, “Yeah- yes, okay.”

“Alright. Off you go then, if you must.” She says, satisfied at last, closing his hand around the paper and opening the truck door for him. He sits himself down inside and slips the torn piece of paper into his pocket, rolling down the window once she has closed the door behind him. 

“And Ryan?” She asks over the sudden hum of the engine. She gives him one last heartfelt smile and leaves him with a statement she does not seek a reply to, patting the side of the truck and offering a nod before she steps back to return inside at the end of her sentence. “Sometimes we can’t see what everyone else can, when we’re too close to it. But if I could give some advice? Don’t pull away for the chance at vision. Just trust your instincts and what it feels like. You don’t need to see it when you can already feel it.”  

With that she takes a step back and despite his furrowed brows at her confusing words, Ryan doesn’t risk being caught lingering, as soon as the door closes behind her, he pulls the truck out of the driveway. He calmly retraces his path through the town and makes it back out to the highway before the panic grips his chest. He remembers through the panic, what he couldn’t in that room. This morning, lying on the seafloor, he forgot to surface. He forgot he was holding his breath. He forgot why Dylan made him feel like he's underwater. He forgot he was drowning. And now he can’t breathe.

For minutes that pass in the same distorted warp as the other cars blurring by on the highway, he can’t suck in any air, his throat closed off completely, unable to draw in a single breath- or maybe he’s breathing fast, too fast. Honestly, he can’t tell, but the air feels thin, like he really is trying to suck oxygen in through saltwater and it burns like it too. He knows he should pull over at this point, but he doesn’t. He forces himself through the lack of air as he holds his breath until he finds the switch in his brain that he can click it all off. It takes a moment, while the pressure builds up in his lungs and he fights the urge to close his eyes, but finally, the emotions dissipate. The fog in the valley blankets his mind completely, leaving all thought and emotion and that rising panic beneath a deep and hazy numbness. His eyes feel fixed to the road and the only sense of his body is where his palms clutch the wheel. He drives the entire way home like this, stopping a few times for food, drink and to stretch his legs, everything feeling fuzzy and distant. He never stops for long, lest he be drawn back through the fog, letting himself go through the short stops in blinks of the eye, experiencing the present of those short few moments like ones already in the past.  

He drives home feeling like an animation of his own making came to life, his eyes the monitor screen and his autonomy turned to nothing more than the simple left turn, right turn, blinker button, peddle step of driving. It’s only when he returns home, that he realises that he has in fact not returned home at all. He kills the truck engine with a sharp twist of the keys, that haze lifted in an instant, as a shock of emotion cleaves through. 

The truck is parked on the side of a street and out through the windshield, the footpath is familiar. The curb is still cracked, the storm drain is still rusted, the weeds still grow through the leaves clogging up the gutter and the telephone pole is still buckled in towards the sidewalk. Shards of glass will still be able to be found in the grass strip and the concrete has russet stains baked into it, still there, over a decade later. Once more, he finds the air thin, even as he opens the door and the cold air rushes into the cab. He steps out surrounded by the scent of pine and the smoke from a nearby chimney. With his sense returned to him, there is a faint relief, buried beneath the pile of grief, guilt and that feeling there is no right word for, not in this language. He doesn’t want to be here, he thinks to himself as he takes a step closer to the curb. He shouldn’t be here, he thinks to himself as the pounding in his ears mimics the sound of blood dripping from his fingers to the roadside. He isn’t meant to be here. It’d be rude to leave now.

He walks forward until his boots hit the curbside. The sight of it has his legs growing weak beneath the weight of emotions and memories thrumming through him, welling up in his eyes in an attempt to escape him, constricting his throat in an attempt to halt him. He hits the ground with a dull ache and sits with his back against the telephone pole. So Ryan just sits there for a while, breathing shallow, remaining silent, breath fogging in the cold. Sits where the flowers were once left, years ago. Sits there until the sun tracks through the sky far enough the light has begun to dim. Sits there until his Nana comes to pick him up, sent by a nosy neighbour no doubt. She pulls him up with a gentle yet firm hand and drags him into a hug. He cranes over her now, more than he did before, his shoulders up to her forehead and he wonders if this hug hurts her in its reminiscence. She lets him sniffle and stay silent, doesn’t let go of his arm even as they pull away and she looks at him with this expression that makes him avert his gaze. 

He looks at the dented telephone pole and he knows. It was never contained, it’s all too familiar here for it to have ever been. The boots he wears, the truck parked beside him, his eyes, his nose, his hands. His hands, that for all he has imagined it, have been clean and dry all morning. The real blood isn’t on his hands, it’s soaked into the sidewalk he sat his palms upon. It’s all and always the same. He won’t let go of Dylan either and still, a resolution can also mean the end of something too.