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It took two months for them to let him back into the dorms, which, in all honesty, Nathan didn't expect them to do at all. He doesn't know if his father has been paying Wells to make sure his son would keep his room, or if Wells somehow has found it in his heart to help - all he knows was that he was allowed to go back, if he continues visiting the hospital three times a week to make sure he's taking his meds properly and sees a therapist. It was an easy deal to accept. Ideally, he'd prefer to go somewhere else for classes - somewhere everyone doesn't hate him - but nowhere else would accept him after the scandal, and it's over the middle of the school year already, so he'd better do as he's asked.
The day he gets back to the dorms happens to be a day his last class is with Warren Graham.
He wouldn't call Warren a "friend" just yet. He'd actually tried to shake off the geek for a week or two after they first talked. Warren insists on sitting with him at lunch, walking him back to the parking lot after classes, and engaging in useless conversation at all times. At first, he'd done his best to pretend they weren't walking together, that the guy was just following him around, but when he noticed that he somehow felt compelled to stop walking everytime Warren did, he had to admit he's walking with him. Then he was sitting with him, and talking with him, and somehow Warren has become positive company.
He doesn't quite understand why he does it; why he tried to help so much. Everyone else already thinks Warren is kind of a weirdo, and he's ostracizing himself even more with this. But he doesn't complain, because nobody else wants to see him.
Victoria was at the trial, blank-faced as she held back tears wonderfully. She and Nathan exchange long looks in class and in hallways, but it seems something has broken in their friendship, and he doesn't know how to approach her just as she hesitates to talk to him. He suspects it would be a while before she could trust him again, if ever.
Hayden, once always quick to defend him, who has helped him more than once back to the dorms after a Vortex Club party and whose bed he shared on a few of those occasions when they'd been too drunk to get in their respective rooms, now looks at him as if he didn't know him. He remembers him at the trial too, one hand on Victoria's shoulder, supportive as always, and the other clenched into a fist on his lap, and he stared at Nathan through it all with the look of someone who just couldn't understand how things had gone so fucking wrong.
Max Caulfield gives him a smile or a nod in the hallways, but she doesn't try to talk to him, and he doesn't want her to. She's done enough to help him already, and it felt like he doesn't really deserve it considering he murdered her friend, accident or no. She and Kate somehow seem to hold no grudge against him, but he isn't about to try and engage them in conversation.
So Warren is the closest thing he has to a friend at the moment, and he supposes it would be foolish to try and fight him off any longer. Better some weirdo's company than no company at all. And it turns out, they have at least one common interest: Nathan let it slip that he enjoyed horror movies, and now Warren won't shut up about horror flicks and films noirs and psychological thrillers. It's better than him talking about science.
"TONIGHT YOU GO BACK IN THE DORMS?", said a note Warren slid him during science class. Nathan gave a nod. It felt weird to think about it - his room had been left untouched for eight months now, and he wondered how it would feel to walk back into it.
"IF YOU NEED STUFF KNOCK AT MY DOOR", read a second note. Another nod. He wouldn't knock at Graham's door.
They walk back to the dorms together. By now people have stopped staring at him and only occasionally try to trip him in hallways. He's becoming invisible. Suddenly he knows what it's like to live on the other side of the fence, and it's not nice.
"Want me to come to your room with you?", Warren asks.
"What am I, five? It's my room. I can handle it."
Graham nods and walks to his own room.
Nathan's slate reads "MAKING BAD CHEMISTRY JOKES BECAUSE ALL THE GOOD ONES ARGON" in a handwriting he's become familiar with. He guesses Warren has been erasing nasty comments and replacing them with terrible puns. He feels vaguely grateful. He unlocks the door and pushes it open.
The room is dark, the blinds half-closed, but he can tell nothing has changed - and thanks to Warren's interventions, no one has busted the door and trashed the room. His projector is in sleep mode. His bed is unmade as if he just left it this morning, and not eight months ago.
As he takes a step inside he realize he did need Warren to come with him. He'll never admit it. He closes the door behind and goes to sit on his bed. Everything feels both familiar and foreign, like going back to an old book you haven't read in years. He strokes the bedsheets, turns on the MP3 player and sighs as the familiar whale songs start.
Suddenly, he feels exhausted. He hasn't even eaten yet, and it's not that late, but he feels like he could go to bed.
He undresses and pulls on one of the old T-shirts he uses as pajamas before going to bed.
*
He wakes up at an unknown hour of the night, sweaty and shaking from a nightmare he's already forgetting and doesn't want to remember. It's usually the same old thing: Jefferson and the words and the touches and a needle stuck in his neck. Every time Mark pumped his veins full of drugs it was like a replacement for the fact his paternal blood would never run through them, and when he wakes from nightmares he feels a guilty nostalgia, a longing for a time when blissful ignorance let him believe he was loved. It feels like an insult to the victims that he can't help but miss Jefferson.
He sits up when he finds the whale songs can't soothe him back into sleep. The room is too dark and too heavy with memories for him to relax. Everything from the smell of it to the faint light filtering through the blinds makes him remember what he has done and what was done to him.
He needs someone, and it's been a while since he's had anyone. If this were another time he'd let himself into Hayden's room, quiet and discreet, because Hayden understood what he needed, and some nights what he needed was not being touched and not being spoken to and Hayden would sit far on the bed from him and listen, and some nights what he needed was hearing a voice and touching a body and knowing it was real and Hayden would hold him until morning and tell him everything he needed to hear.
But Hayden isn't his friend anymore and he has no one to turn to.
He paces around the room a few times and considers pulling a DVD from his collection to watch, but he remembers how they're all dark and scary and freaky and this isn't what he needs right now.
He resolves to go and seek Hayden out. Perhaps he still has a chance.
As he opens the door, the realization hits him he hasn't considered someone else.
Instead of going forward to Hayden's room, he turns towards Warren's door, steps up to it, hesitates. There's another chemistry pun on the door but it's not Warren's handwriting, so he wonders who wrote it. Is the guy asleep? He doesn't want to wake him up, nobody likes being woken up and nobody wants to help when they're being woken up.
He knocks quietly enough that if Warren sleeps, he won't hear it.
There's a few seconds of complete silence, enough for him to decide that Graham is sleeping already and start to turn around, and just then the door opens.
Warren doesn't look like someone who was sleeping, but he does look like someone who was just about to go to bed. His hair is messy, and he's only wearing some kind of sweatpants. Nathan would consider his shirtlessness awkward if it wasnt for the fact he himself is wearing boxers and a dumb shirt that says "My sister went to Brazil and all I got was this lousy T-shirt". He guesses he can excuse Warren's outfit.
"Problem?", Warren asks, and Nathan feels a sudden surge of relief when he hears his voice because this is it, this is what he needs, he needs warm and friendly and familiar and not being alone just this once.
"I had a nightmare", he says. It's childish. Warren doesn't seem to care. He takes a step back to let him into the room and closes the door behind.
"Wanna talk about it?", he asks; Nathan shakes his head. This isn't that kind of night. This is the kind of night where he needs someone to tell him everything will be alright even though it wont be.
Warren sits on his bed and pats the space next to him. Nathan sits. The room is warm and it smells like how Warren smells when he's close enough to tell. It's good and comfortable as he is. He feels a hand rest on his shoulder and turns to find a sympathetic smile on Warren's lips, and he just can't help it when he throws his body against him and his arms around his neck and holds onto him for dear life as the sobs come. He half-expects Warren to push him off and half doesn't care. Instead, he feels arms locking around his waist and pulling him into a tighter embrace.
Warren lays back into the bed and pulls him along, and Nathan rests his head against his shoulder and cries for every night in the hospital he kept his tears quiet and every nightmare that shook him awake, every nasty stare in the hallways and every biting glare from his former friends. He barely hears Warren mumble reassuring platitudes against his hair, only minds the hands stroking his back, reminding him that this is real and he is alive, alive, alive, Mark failed to kill him. He didn't allow himself to be killed and he still hasn't given up and he isn't broken like Mark wanted him to be, and he's the one who won this battle, and the thought is the first comforting one he's had in very, very long.
He closes his eyes when the sobs eventually fade out, focusing more on the sound of Warren's voice than the words he actually speaks. When he falls asleep it's not to the sound of whale songs but Warren's heartbeat against his ear.