Chapter Text
WINTER.
He was watching the way Jonas scrubbed at his hands to rid the blood of the rabbit they had caught, when he realises he was staring, and not just watching. Jonas rubbed at his fingers like he was trying to rub away more than just the faint film of dried blood that was plastered over his calloused skin. Noah blinks, and the little bar of salvaged soap slips from Jonas’ hands and into the bucket of water with a plop.
“You’re staring at me as though you want to kill me.” He says after a moment, very quietly, when he had finished cleaning his hands. Noah looks up from where he was sat from the other end of the battered table. He felt like laughing at the comment; they knew each other well enough to make a joke out of something, but Noah had the psychic sense of knowing when something was just, a little off.
“You imitate dead game.” He states rather bluntly, testing the water.
“You imitate a religious fanatic.”
Noah snorts at that, lets out a breathy chuckle, and he sees Jonas grin for a split second without looking up to meet the other’s face. Neither of the insults were true, but they went along with them anyway. It was something to poke at. Finding things to poke at was a way of maintaining a certain degree of normality—yet there was hardly anything to poke at anymore, especially when the world was submerged in the aftermath of the apocalypse. It was difficult to look back and realise that once, everything had been good. Everything had been fine.
It’s kind of fine now, too, Noah replies in his head. Humans were like any other animal. They adapted. Maybe not physically in such a short amount of time, but mentally.
Jonas scrunches his nose in thought, still picking at his bitten nails. He dries his hands with the stained rag that was sat adjacent to him. “What do you think about piling into one cabin for the winter?” He asks.
Noah nods without a word, and gets up from the table. He was going to check on Elisabeth. She became awfully quiet when she was skinning the little animals they brought back for her; she hardly made any noise when she was outside at the front of their cabin.
It sometimes disturbed him, for he had never met a pretty young girl to be so eager to practice such a thing. His sister Agnes, used to chase after the first red admiral butterfly she saw at the start of summer. She would never dream of cutting a smaller, living being apart—but this is the fucking apocalypse, Hanno.
“She’ll like that.” Noah swallows, as he heads for the door. He didn’t even need to say it was Elisabeth he was referring to. The only “she” that was between him and Jonas was her, after all.
“I was asking you.” Jonas adds, the second Noah’s hand turned the cold door handle. When he turns his head to look back, the immediate sight of Jonas’ boyish blue eyes meeting his sent a shiver down his spine. The subtly mournful paleness that rested in the boy’s gaze unsettled him, although rarely. He always looked as though he had just had an intense conversation with Death itself.
“Yes,” Noah answers. “I think it’s a good idea. It’ll be safer, if we’re all together.”
Two weeks later, when Elisabeth had stepped outside and nearly slipped on frosted earth, they decided to move each of their mattresses into the small living area where the open fire was, in the cabin that belonged to Noah and Elisabeth, and rearranged the small functional kitchen to make more room.
Before the three of them had came together, it had just been Noah, and a shy, traumatised Elisabeth. When Jonas appeared bruised and disorientated, Noah had automatically assumed she wanted to be closer to him due to the fact that they knew each other before the apocalypse, had more in common, and shared the same memories of the people they once knew (also being from the same era)—but she never once opted for that, even when they had built two cabins throughout the beginning of summer and to the end of autumn.
In some way, factually and unconsciously, whoever Elisabeth chose to live with, determined who she would end up sleeping with—and for an instant Noah blurted he would be fine if she wanted to go between the two (if she got sick of him), but she didn’t understand the context of his half-formed statement, and he prayed she wasn’t as sharp as he thought she was.
Noah had mentally flogged himself that evening, just for allowing the thought to come into his head, and further shunned himself by taking a cold wash outside the morning after.
The crude yet solidly built cabins were always a work-in-progress, something that Noah decided would always need extensive attention where necessary. They often did frequent checks, in case any of the roofing needed to be replaced, or if the makeshift insulation was still intact for the next set of cold months to come.
Last summer, Noah was able to hunt two deer he had found near the outskirts of the forest, and he was adamant in keeping the hides to tan despite Jonas’ subtle grimaces, as the furs would help keep the warmth within the cabin during winter. That was when Elisabeth took an interest in the process, when she watched in silent, almost frightened awe at how Noah worked unforgivingly on the animal carcasses.
She said she wanted to change, then. In order to help. The deer hide ended up as a rug, both cut and stitched together into a minimal, logical design by Elisabeth, and had been laid on their cabin floor ever since. Jonas hadn’t liked standing barefoot on it for a while, when he left his own little cabin to help make dinner. Both Noah and Elisabeth had found that funny.
Noah felt as though he had been thumped in the temples that night, when he lay his head down into his pillow, facing Elisabeth’s small, coiled figure from across the floor.
The linen was rough and worn against his skin, but it smelled unusually nice; it reminded him of home, where he used to be, and where he had came from.
The tiniest of tears sometimes pricked the corners of his eyes deep into the night, when he was half-anchored to the heaviest state of sleep, and the thought of Agnes—and his father—but with time and repressive effort he managed to withdraw the thoughts and feelings back into his chest, until he wanted to let them back out again, just to see if they were there and still existed. To remember if they were even real.
Noah swallows, eyes sealed shut. Beneath the quilt that was thrown over his body he pulls his knees to his chest, turns his head further into the pillow, lets out a gentle sigh. He could smell the faint remnants of the fire they had lit in the cobbled hearth before going to sleep. The air that hung around him was cool. He cracks open one eye to check on Elisabeth, who was closest to the dampened fire. She was still curled in the same position from before, but had her blonde hair sprawled out along her back.
He doesn’t know how much time passes between then and now—when he feels the mattress he’s laid on dip ever so slightly, near his lower back. Noah doesn’t react, because he knew it was Jonas. He could smell him, and hear him. Jonas shuffled most of the time, like naive woodland prey. That’s how Noah knew it was him.
“It’s cold.” Jonas murmurs, voice weary, and Noah doesn’t even roll over. He feels the quilt lift for a moment, and then a body settles behind him. A knee unavoidably knocks him in the lower back, and Noah lets out a gentle grunt.
“Sorry.”
Whatever, came the internal reply.
He expected to feel more uncomfortable having Jonas pressed up against him for the first time, but he didn’t. Noah was unsure if he should feel somewhat horrified of the aspect—at one point, in the initial days of meeting, they had disliked each other. He nearly saw Jonas as a threat to his and Elisabeth’s setup, and Jonas had thought Noah was unreasonably menacing, but maybe that was because they were both male, and there wasn’t going to be just one alpha that made the group.
Differences aside, they somehow got used to one another, Elisabeth being the pacifier between them, almost acting like a counsellor sometimes. It made Noah realise that she had far more maturity than both him and Jonas combined.
But apart from that, Noah had never expected their friendship to become as soft as this.
A couple of hours later, he woke again, this time feeling as though he was suffocating with the heat that enveloped his body. In the cold dark, he could still smell Jonas—but now Elisabeth. Both of them.
Noah opens his eyes, feels his nose itch, and he swipes a lock of blonde hair away from his face, and realises that the three of them were squished together on a single mattress. Jonas had his back to him. Noah sits up between them, and notices how Elisabeth was curled up against his side, rolled in her own blanket, lips parted in a deep, peaceful slumber.
She must have been cold too.
He then realises he was sweating from the heat between them all, and he struggles to free himself from the tight wedge he was stuck in, and breathes out when he’s wearily stood over them, warm bare feet against the deer hide rug on the cabin floor.
Noah brushes back the stray hairs from his brow. “Really?” He utters to himself.
He actually welcomed the settled cold of the cabin, when he decided to take Jonas’ makeshift bed for the rest of the night, unable to withstand the stifling heat of sharing with two other bodies.