Work Text:
Elisabeth woke to the thunder of a slamming door.
It would come as a surprise to no-one that it was not the sound of departure that startled her out of a pleasant and warm slumber, but rather the way the world responded to it; the wooden walls of the aging cabin shuddered from the impact, including the one she was currently curled against, having wriggled in her sleep as far into the dark corner of the small room as the mattress allowed, and as her brain struggled to supply meaning to her bleary vision she recognized in the dim light of a dying fire the outline of Noah, half-dressed and standing in the middle of the cabin, arms hanging limply at his sides for only a moment until he approached the door and jerked it open with a retaliatory ferocity and stuck his head out into the night.
Something had happened—something that did not warrant panic, it seemed, for Noah had not drawn his gun or scrambled to dress himself for wandering into the deep dark of winter, but the severity or meaning of whatever had transpired was impossible to discern in this state. Elisabeth stretched out her limbs and twisted and felt a sequence of pops in her spine that signalled the waking of her joints from a long winter’s rest, and she took sleepy satisfaction in knowing that she must have slept hard for a few hours, although the forest was still black beyond the windows, not yet heralding the coming dawn, which meant that the world around them must have been sleeping too. This time of year, night lasted so very long. There was nothing to do but sleep, sometimes. Sleep and dream and remember the warmth of a better world.
The cabin walls shook again, and Elisabeth, startled this second time from a return plunge into unconsciousness, blinked her eyes open and watched a cold gust of air make the curtains and a few loose papers stir on a table near the door as Noah withdrew back into the safety of the cabin, his expression dour in the waning firelight, making it unmistakable that he had slammed the door in some obvious state of discontent. His eyes caught the dim light and flashed like a dog’s as he turned away from the door.
Absent, most notably, was Jonas.
Elisabeth reached out an arm and drew back the blankets, sacrificing the small pocket of heat she had accumulated to communicate that some comfort still waited for him, even though the mattress was cool next to her, with only a hint of warmth from a body that had in fact been present when she had fallen asleep. The boys must have been up for some time now, doing whatever they often did in the dark, well away from the bed to avoid jostling her awake—wisely, as she would have banished them both to a different cabin entirely if their play had robbed her of precious sleep—but since Noah now approached the bed with the stiff movement of an angry toddler, it seemed unlikely that he would sleep easily, and less likely that Jonas would sleep with them at all.
Noah, crawling onto the mattress on all fours, accepted her silent invitation without protest. The scent of outdoors swept into the bed with him, a whisper of fresh winter air that might have come from the door’s closure or perhaps from spending time in the woods earlier in the evening. He did not smell like cigarettes or spirits or sweat or any of the things that he and Jonas often shared, but rather like firewood and smoke, like a late night spent in quiet conversation, and he curled around Elisabeth and heaved a sigh that pressed his ribs against her own as though he wanted to rub them together to set him alight, or perhaps to smother whatever currently smouldered in the shared bed and in his heart.
Elisabeth’s gaze lingered on the closed door for only a moment. Jonas was an enigma to them both, and she could not ask about what she had not seen. It was easy to bury her nose in Noah’s neck and let her eyelids flutter shut and focus instead on the angry thrash in his chest. His arm rested heavy over her body, and he exhaled once against the top of her head, a sharp gust of frustration, and then like a beast in death all of Noah softened all at once and the warm tickle of his breath in her hair did not come for a worryingly long while.
Heat filled the space beneath the blanket, and the thud of Noah’s heart in his chest became the echo of a slamming door.
Elisabeth blindly traced a finger over the small of Noah’s back. ‘Jonas’, the lines spelled, some of the letters backward and some not, simply because the warmth was beginning to tug at her again. When she finished, Noah’s chest expanded against her own with a slow inhale that told her everything she needed to know.
“Coming back?” she asked next, and this time Noah’s hand shifted behind her back, calloused fingers slipping beneath the fabric of her shirt to write out ‘eventually’ on her skin and make her shiver.
“What happened?”
Noah’s hand hesitated on her back, lingering broad and warm and a little more alluring the longer it remained, an unwitting invitation to slip out of consciousness and back into the comfortable embrace of slumber. She would fall asleep if he did not respond. It was possible she’d fall asleep even if he did. “Nothing. My mistake. My…”
Noah’s fingers traced the same pattern, and the final letters grew fuzzy as sleep threatened to claim Elisabeth yet again. Maybe it wasn’t the same word after all, but something else. An excuse. An explanation. Didn’t make sense. Noah was here, had always been here, would always be here until eternity in Paradise called him home. It was Jonas who was absent, who could not commit to settling in the tiny sanctuary they had determinedly carved into the face of Winden, who had made the mistake of thinking he could outwit the fate they had been given and thus free himself from the burden that was his and his alone to bear.
Whatever mistake Noah had made, Jonas would forgive.
He had no other choice.
“He’ll want you to go get him,” Elisabeth wrote, forgetting to reverse any of the letters at all this time, and she felt the gentle vibration of Noah’s throat and chest as he held her tighter and made some sound, probably one of agreement, purring like a cat to coax her to sleep, a rocking of the world that was far gentler and more loving than the slamming door had been.
She did not fight the fish-hook tug of sleep this time. They both knew Jonas would be back by morning, because that was what the boys always did in the dark, when the day was done and the business was concluded and the mattress waited for them, warmed in the corner where Elisabeth slept. And now the fire was dying, and the winter night was still dark and cold, and Noah was breathing like he needed to hoist a sword and walk with a warrior’s confidence into the open mouth of a labyrinth, and even though they did not always see eye-to-eye, Noah and Jonas, someone needed to keep her warm until the sun rose and the light brought a little bit of hope with it.
She did not doubt that they would.
—
It was the first winter during which Winden had seen no snow at all, and everything in the town and the surrounding woods looked dead. Fortunately, under the cover of night—and on this particular night, under the cover of a deluge of rain, a downpour that should have covered Winden in enough snow to halt the town in its tracks—the rotting leaves and forest detritus looked the same as everything else. Without the moon or a flashlight for guidance, every step away from safety, away from light, was a step into the abyss, an opportunity to be consumed and whisked away into the promise of a better world.
But Jonas knew the woods better than most. Every step away from the light was a step he had taken a thousand times before, and there would be no yawning void for him to walk into. No gaping maw. No escape from the things that awaited him, from the shadows that branched off of his own and spread like horrible oil slicks, eager to swallow a spark and roar into brilliant life and look at him with sad blue eyes and the knowledge of a thousand years of suffering to come.
Every step away from the light was a step toward that terrible fucking cave, and the cave had a terrible fucking voice.
“Elisabeth wants you to come back,” said a shadow in the dark, sourceless and low, the sound creeping beneath his hood like a sinister mist rising from the forest floor. “You shouldn’t be out here.”
It felt as though Jonas had managed to shut the world out for only a few minutes, and those minutes had not lasted nearly long enough. The rain pounded on the trees high overhead and drummed on the forest floor, obliterating almost all other sound in the vicinity, and what the rain did not muffle, his drawn jacket hood did. He had not heard anyone approach, nor had he noticed the focused beam of a flashlight glancing off the gleaming underbrush or piercing the wall of water that fell over the cave mouth before him. His eyes had been closed since he’d taken his place on the wet ground, and for those precious few minutes there had only been darkness and cold and in the hypnotising static hiss of the rain.
Jonas had almost managed to forget what he had walked away from.
He said nothing. He did not open his eyes. The cold rain washed over him in silence. The crackle of a fire would have felt better, but the thought of walking back into that cabin, back into the light, made his stomach twist with an uncomfortable and unfamiliar hunger.
“Jonas. Come on.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a command, too tough and gristly to satisfy any hunger, and carried too unpleasant a taste to even chew on.
He thought of sad blue eyes. Eyes that had seen something of the future and would give him nothing that he wanted, and everything that he did not.
Oh, but Elisabeth wanted him to return.
Footsteps drew nearer, the ordinary crunch of leaf and twig underfoot dampened by the rain and soft ground. With his eyes closed Jonas could sense the approaching presence, a figure who underneath his own protective coat was nothing but lean muscle and evasive language, slinking like a greasy wolf sizing up its prey, but in the absence of sight he could almost imagine that the downcast gaze and cautious approach was accompanied by something resembling regret.
Or else a caution appropriate for ensuring that an animal would not flee before he struck.
“You didn’t have to leave.”
Jonas opened his eyes but did not yet lift his head. He could see little from beneath his hood. The shine of water pooling on the saturated forest floor… the tops of his knees darkened and damp with rainwater, leeching the heat from his legs even though he was dry under his jacket. The tips of two wet boots were barely visible in the oppressive dark.
“What alternative would you suggest?”
“I’d suggest coming back with me. It’s too cold to stay out here.” The voice paused. “I can add something to the fire. We can talk for a while.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Would you like me to tell Elisabeth that I left you to freeze?”
“I don’t care what you tell her. Say whatever you want. Tell her I…”
There was no part of Jonas that wished to be mean-spirited toward Elisabeth. He didn’t possess the will for it. He had no teeth or claws, no fur to bristle in a threat display. He had a tail tucked limply between his legs, and he did not even have the energy to die by throwing himself into the salivating jaws of an opponent. He could close doors. Not open them.
“You can tell her yourself. You woke her when you left. I told her to go back to sleep. Said I’d find you myself.”
Regret struck like lightning. Jonas had hoped she would not take notice of an angry departure, but he knew it was not only the air that rang in the wake of a door closed in anger. Neither of his parents had been truly angry people, and no doors in the Kahnwald household had ever closed with force. No windows had ever shuddered from impact. No silence had ever sprung in the wake of raised voices. He was not an angry person. He was not a person who closed doors with the intent to hurt. He was not a person who walked away.
Most of the time.
There was nothing to say. Jonas shrugged helplessly, jacket hissing with gentle displeasure. The rain slapped his head as though to admonish him for his carelessness, his cowardice.
“You found me. Now you can leave,” Jonas said, hoping futilely for the opposite.
The figure in the dark shifted, sinking lower, kneeling in the mud before Jonas. A hand rested cautiously atop his knee.
“Come back with me. Please.”
The rain continued to fall, a thousand minuscule gunshots failing to penetrate Jonas’s skull. His head ached, though whether from exhaustion or frustration or anger or sorrow he could not discern. It was all the same to him, all a different shade of devastating, and the world did not care enough to let him alleviate any of those things anyway. His head would ache for the rest of his pathetic life. His heart would feel like this forever, shattered and mended and encased within the thin shell of his chest with things battering against it, hoping to wear it away and then to carve paths across the surface of his heart over the course of thirty-three years and then thirty-three more and leave him unrecognizable to even himself.
That was what the world wanted.
That was what Noah wanted.
So he said.
The boots on the ground shuffled impatiently. The rain hissed like radio static on the forest floor. The longer Noah was forced to wait, the more irritable he was likely to become. By all accounts, it should have been a fair trade, but Jonas could tell that Noah would not entertain his game for much longer and he was fast running out of places to retreat to.
“Why,” asked Noah gently, still kneeling before him, “do you insist on being miserable? What amount of punishment do you think you truly deserve? What would make you change your mind?”
Jonas hugged his legs to his chest and listened to the rain and retreated into the recesses of his own mind, a labyrinth that Noah could not chase him into, yet one he could not truly lose himself in. Noah’s exasperated exhalations drifted through tunnels of possibility and unrealised hopes and desires like a smoke grenade.
“How can I convince you to come back?”
“You can’t.”
“You’re wrong,” said Noah, hand warm on Jonas’s wet knee. “There’s something wrong. What do I need to do?”
“You don’t need to do anything. Go back to the cabin. Cuddle by the fire with your…”
Jonas’s voice cracked. He stopped abruptly, fleeing his thoughts and the thick haze of loneliness that had finally choked him out, and felt for the first time the cold in his fingers and feet, the winter air too warm for snow or ice yet too cool to remain in. He would have preferred snow, would have preferred to sit in the calmness of a heavy storm, to slowly leech the cold from the ground and let his nervous system be lulled into a long and deep slumber until he was numb to the world. But there had been no snow this winter and the rain was an eternal and merciless torment from the heavens, its cold piercing in a way that snow never was. The chill did not come from the sky. Jonas carried it inside himself, and no amount of Noah’s persistence would warm it.
He’d come so close to feeling something in the cabin. Something sincere, something impossible. The fire had been to blame for that, with all the safety and comfort it promised. There was something hypnotic about it so late in the evening, with the rain beating steadily on the roof and the shadows kept at bay and the fireplace crackling, flames teasing, caressing, a presence in the room speaking in a calm and soothing voice that had nearly enticed him to fall for the same lie that Elisabeth had fallen for… yet he was not Elisabeth, and he could not succumb to the same promise of salvation that allowed her to sleep so peacefully while the rest of the world rotted around them.
But he’d wanted to. If he’d allowed himself that moment of obliviousness, if he’d allowed that voice to envelop him and caress his skin with promises of warmth and safety, to lick at him until he weakened and crumbled and became soft enough to disintegrate and blow away in the wind…
He couldn’t do that out here. Not in the cave, not in the forest. Noah’s hand on his knee was a promise of what awaited him. Maybe it didn’t need to be this way after all. Maybe he could still wear his hood like a shroud and blind himself to the state of the world and welcome the warmth on his skin and think nothing of the world that was now and remember only the world that had been. Just for a while.
As Jonas blinked water from his eyes, a second hand wrapped around one of his ankles and, with a sharp tug and the departing warmth of both hands joining the first, Noah began to drag Jonas along the forest floor.
Startled, more than unwilling to be dragged back to the cabin like hunted meat or a trader’s prize, Jonas lashed out with his free foot and struck one of Noah’s hands in the dark; Noah swore loudly and released him, yet as Jonas scrambled to his feet, shaking water from his hood, he did not see Noah rushing at him until the force of his body slammed into Jonas’s chest and toppled them both. It happened too quickly for him to react, Jonas falling on his back with a yelp and Noah falling with him, growling like a wild animal, and together they slipped and scrambled in the mud and dead leaves and sharp debris of dead trees as Jonas attempted to climb to his feet and was stopped fast by Noah crawling atop him and shoving his back against the wet earth.
“Get off! Get the fuck—!”
Noah reached up and shoved Jonas’s hood back from his face, exposing him to the pummelling rain for the first time to allow water to fall in his open mouth and his eyes and nose. Jonas sputtered and coughed and shoved futilely at Noah’s chest, his hands covered in mud and rapidly losing sensation, and felt the front of his jacket jerk violently as Noah, fingers moving quickly and without precision, attempted to unfasten it.
Panic, an old and forgotten relic of the world that only Jonas remembered, erupted within him like a volcano.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” Jonas thrashed and scrabbled at Noah’s hands, but Noah had leverage and, despite his leanness, was impossible to dislodge, heavy enough to both hold Jonas in place in the half-frozen mud and continue his grim task; he tore open Jonas’s jacket and Jonas felt the heat he had accumulated dissipate like steam as the rain began to soak into his dry clothing and rapidly chill his skin, and each time he reached to close the gap and protect himself from the rain Noah grabbed at his wrist with slippery cold fingers and shoved his hand into the saturated earth. Slowly, centimetre by halted centimetre, he managed to expose more of Jonas’s torso, a featureless shadow that blocked the rain at times and sought to strip Jonas of every bit of protection he carried on him.
“If you want to stay here and suffer,” Noah grunted above, his own hood obscuring his face in the rain, rendering him an anonymous haloed angel of doom, “just fucking stay!”
Jonas strained. Water was pooling on the inside of his jacket and seeping into his clothing. One of his wrists slipped from Noah’s grasp long enough to grant him a single retort, and Jonas used the opportunity to scrape a handful of mud and twig and small rocks from the ground nearby and smeared it across the front of Noah’s face, dragging the coarse mixture over his cheek and mouth until Noah grunted and twisted his head, teeth bared in a grimace.
Jonas needed no further distraction. He shoved his hand into Noah’s hood, grasping for a handful of whatever dry material rested at the nape of his neck, and successfully pulled Noah down atop him, granting himself partial cover from the rain even as Noah hissed at the intrusion and shoved his hand beneath Jonas‘s half-soaked sweater and smeared more mud on his bare skin and attempted to expose him further.
The rain stopped, temporarily blocked by the shape of Noah’s hood. His face was barely visible in the dark, obscured by mud and small fragments of rock and leaf and long sharp needles that had fallen from the trees months ago. What Jonas could see of him looked more animal than human.
Jonas shuddered, turned his head, coughed water that was attempting to accumulate in his mouth and dripping into his nasal sinuses. His breath came ragged, puffs of mist dissipating in the air. His body trembled from adrenaline and the unrelenting cold and the uncertainty of this horrible act. The ground was soft and hard all at once and granted him no ability to brace or evade, and Noah, sitting on his thighs like an anchor and locked into position by a grip he was not attempting to break, was still attempting to blindly tear open Jonas’s clothing with unsteady claws.
If Jonas did not choke or freeze in this struggle, he would succumb to some horrible other fate—this thing Noah was doing that was neither killing him nor escorting him to safety nor allowing him to wallow in misery in self-imposed isolation. Jonas could not fathom what it meant that Noah’s quickened breath warmed his skin from above while his fingers, icy daggers scraping against Jonas’s ribs, slid insistently beneath Jonas’s clothing and under his squirming torso, where no more rain touched him directly because Noah’s body now blocked it and forced the rain to fall around them both.
Jonas was losing sensation in his legs. But Noah, straddling him, was still kneeling in the mud too, likely growing numb everywhere except for where their bodies met.
“Stop,” Noah hissed, his breathless voice far quieter than the rain pattering on his own back. His breath smelled like something Jonas didn’t possess words for, the winter-decay of the forest and deep wet earth. “Stop. Stop. Just stop resisting. Stop making it so hard to get what you want.”
He was shivering, too. His hands were trembling under Jonas, palms flat against his back, warming Jonas in those two spots where his back no longer pressed into cold fabric but into damp skin. Jonas shifted and felt the pressure of ten fingers press into him, holding him in an embrace that promised both temporary reprieve from the cold and a willingness to invite that suffering in at a moment’s notice.
Noah’s hood drooped low, encircling Jonas’s head. Now Jonas could see his face, a solemn mask of black earth partially distorted by rain that clung to Jonas’s eyelashes and tears that had not fully formed.
Jonas’s pulse pounded in his ears, his cold limbs, his heaving wet chest, and the place where Noah’s thighs pressed steadily down atop his own. His back was beginning to heat rapidly where Noah’s hands cradled him, and his own fingers, still buried in the back of Noah’s jacket, were beginning to tingle.
He watched Noah’s lips part, glistening with wet debris, and the mere thought of discovering the bitter taste of it made Jonas’s belly twist, low and hot, not distant from where Noah’s weight still rested, unrelenting and almost comfortable, atop his thighs.
Shivering, breathing shallowly into the lightless shared sanctuary of Noah’s hood, Jonas waited.
His fingers softened their grip on Noah’s shirt, and curled instead around the nape of his neck, drawing Noah’s head nearer his own.
“Come home,” Noah whispered. His hands were softer now, too, hot from their shared body heat, twin stars emblazoned upon Jonas’s back. His vicious determination had melted. His hood engulfed Jonas’s head. There was no light by which to see him, and so Jonas closed his eyes and shuddered as Noah’s mouth, cold and wet, pressed a sticky ring of mud against the front of his throat. “I’ll make a new fire.”
Jonas, burning, nodded.
—
Jagged splinters of wood pressed into Noah’s bare back, none sharp enough to pierce but somewhat uncomfortable all the same. His mouth was dry—the air in the cabin tasted of heavy woodsmoke, especially near the floor where loose embers glowed dully not far from his head and the now-forgotten fire flickered with occasional bursts of enthusiasm—but there was no distraction in the world great enough to draw his attention from the pressure of Jonas’s cock spreading him open, the mass of Jonas’s body atop his own, between his thighs, pressing him down into the wood debris and dirt that littered the cabin floor.
Noah welcomed the feeling. He could still feel the pull of drying mud on his face and in his hair, despite most of it having dissolved in the rain or brushed away when he had shed his jacket and sweater and let Jonas’s roaming fingers find the inside of his mouth. Bits of dirt still clung to them both, some from the floor where the muddy water dripped from their boots and dried next to the fire each night and some from the wood that Noah usually brought inside and split into smaller pieces and some from this evening, a reminder of all that had occurred in the hours before now.
It was an insignificant detail, the dirt, grime, mud. Noah’s nose and cheeks stung where impossibly small rocks had been scraped over his skin, and parts of Jonas’s torso were stained dark where the mud had been rubbed into his clothing and body and had not yet been washed away, and it seemed a foolish notion to pretend that either of them were in any way clean or unblemished; Jonas’s face was pressed into Noah’s neck, and his tongue was hot and wet and his teeth were sharp and whatever he was attempting to do was better than any hot-water baptism either of them had envisioned awaiting for them at their home. His hand—not the one planted on the floor, but rather the one gripping Noah’s thigh—still had thick crescents of dirt under the fingernails.
Noah had considered letting him use that one anyway.
Grunting under Jonas’s weight, Noah tipped back his head and dug his fingers into Jonas’s flexing spine. His skin had warmed quickly, and now Noah’s fingers slipped over a thin layer of sweat in the small of his back and stopped only when he pressed his fingertips in and clutched at Jonas, whose shifting belly rubbed against Noah’s cock as he fucked him, eager and unpracticed and unlike anything Noah had felt in a very long time.
He had noticed a change in Jonas in the forest. It was impossible to say when he had noticed it, as it had all happened so quickly, that mad scramble in the dark and the rain and the winter cold, the mud-slap and the way Jonas’s body had stiffened with resistance and then ceased resisting almost at Noah’s command… but he’d seen it, something gleaming black and strange in the night, something reflected in Jonas’s eyes that the fire had not caught in the quiet moments before Jonas had left the cabin and marched off into the darkness. And he’d misunderstood it twice now, once in the firelight and once in the rain, but his second mistake had been a lesser one, more quickly forgiven, if indeed this was forgiveness; the trek back to the cabin had been almost entirely silent, both chilled and shaken from two vastly different experiences, and the silence had been thick and earthy and Noah had not yet learned how to apologise for something he did not regret and Jonas had obviously not been angry or frightened enough.
There had been no swift closing of the door. Elisabeth was asleep, and did not need to wake and worry herself with the state of them, which would have been difficult enough to explain if they had returned and disrobed in sullen silence, and more difficult still to explain why their clothing had dropped to the floor almost immediately and Noah with it.
The door had been closed so, so carefully. But the cabin was not silent.
“What were you trying to do when you opened my jacket?”
Jonas’s voice was muffled against Noah’s skin. He was breathing hard with the exertion, and each time he buried his cock in Noah’s body he grunted, a noise that was beginning to lose its soft edge.
Noah slid his fingers through Jonas’s hair, which was not yet fully dry, and cradled the back of his head. It was easier to not look him in the eye, somehow. His gaze, unfocused, wandered across the wooden beams in the ceiling. “You wanted misery. I wanted to… give you more of it.”
Jonas moaned against his ear. Coarse grains of dirt were caught between strands of his hair and shifted under Noah’s fingers.
“I thought you were… going to do something worse.”
“I can’t kill you,” Noah murmured.
“I know.”
Noah gasped as Jonas pushed on his thigh, shifting the position of his pelvis, and rocked into him. Whatever sour taste had been prepared to rise in Noah’s mouth at the unspoken implication of whatever Jonas had expected—whatever he had expected, violent or bloody or invasive or otherwise—erupted from him in a broken moan instead. His body was unaccustomed to such stimulation, and Jonas responded to all of his sounds the same, yet he could think of no transgression that would make him ask Jonas to stop.
He let his head fall back to the floor with a dull thud and rolled his eyes back. Jonas’s mouth moved across his throat. Noah would not have called it a kiss, but he could feel the shape of Jonas’s lips shifting, and he wondered, with the edge of the mattress barely in his line of sight, whether Jonas was speaking to him now as Elisabeth did, a silent language meant to be shared and understood only between two, a method of communicating when the need to say something was present and the act otherwise too difficult to do.
Still cradling Jonas’s head, Noah lifted his other arm behind him and gripped the old metal frame of the bed and let the force of each of Jonas’s thrusts rattle it through him.
“Earlier,” he grunted, “when you… ah… when you kissed me, I didn’t mean to pull away. I wanted you to…”
Jonas’s nose brushed against the side of his jaw, and Noah tore his gaze from the side of the mattress as Jonas slowed, rubbing his palm along the inside of Noah’s thigh, the last of the dying firelight flickering on one side of his body and glinting on the wet surface of his eyes.
Noah ran his tongue over his lips and watched Jonas’s eyes track the motion. No apology necessary.
“In the forest… at the cave… would you have let me?”
The fire stuttered, and for a brief moment the light was extinguished entirely and the small single-room cabin fell into a near-complete winter darkness, though some fragments of blackened wood still glowed a dull red. Jonas shifted his arms and braced himself over Noah, getting down low on his elbows and forearms until he blanketed Noah from nose to groin, and only then did a small flame shudder back into existence in the fireplace, stubborn and begging for a life that Noah could not give it.
“No,” Jonas whispered. His mouth brushed over Noah’s like a ghost, and something strange danced in his eyes, kindled by the persistent flame. “Would you have tried?”
He inhaled softly as Noah curled his arms around Jonas’s torso and kissed him, long, deep, hungry. He squeezed Jonas with his thighs and hooked his ankles behind Jonas’s legs, and he let a groan simmer in his chest and throat as Jonas began to fuck him again, slow and thorough, his cock thick and hot and barely withdrawing from Noah’s body at all and his belly scraping its coarse hair against Noah’s own cock, sensitive and pleading for direct stimulation and leaking between them and fusing their skin together as Noah arched against Jonas and drew him into a tighter embrace and moaned again, his breathless lungs aching and eager to be filled like the rest of him.
Jonas moaned too. Moaned as he had earlier in the evening, warm and comfortable and confident in the evening firelight, kissing Noah for the first time after casting a long and thoughtful gaze over the sleeping shape of Elisabeth in the corner. Noah hadn’t stopped him immediately—it was possible the door would not have slammed if Noah hadn’t drawn away after sucking Jonas’s tongue into his mouth—and he did not wish to stop him now, did not wish to muffle the music of his moans in the air, did not wish to suggest that they conceal this coupling from Elisabeth or Claudia and save it only for private spaces.
Noah was certain that Jonas was not telling the truth about the forest.
He had not told the truth, either.
Noah lifted a hand to the bedframe, bracing himself against it, and this time Jonas lifted a hand and covered Noah’s fingers with his own and let his gentleness perish with the embers in the fireplace. He fucked Noah harder, groaning with exertion, and when his cock began to pulse with heat he buried himself in Noah body and shuddered and whimpered like a wounded animal and flooded Noah with the same thrill that Noah had felt in the forest, in that quiet moment of understanding when Jonas’s heaving body had melted under his hands and the opportunity to be someone else, a character in a mask painted by Jonas himself, had vibrated just under his fingertips as though it had been within him all along, waiting to tear itself free from him, needing to be planted in the forest and left to mature and spread in silence like some insidious and invasive species.
Jonas did not need an answer. He had it already, and the ache in Noah’s back and hips and groin was proof enough of that.
When Jonas pushed himself up and sat back, brushing his damp hair out of his face, the translucent smear of come on his belly mingling with the leftover mud in a strange and alien design, he lifted his head and glanced at the mattress in the dull red dark and grew still.
Noah winced as he sat upright. He felt the tender rawness of his skin where Jonas had made obvious attempts to mark him when he turned his head, and when he caught the faint gleam of Elisabeth’s eyes in the ember-glow he smiled, warm and lazy and eager to join her soon, and crawled stiffly on all fours to the fireplace where the hot water they kept for cleaning had not yet cooled.
“Jonas,” he said, and upon turning back saw that Jonas was sitting on his knees, hands shifting in the near-dark, a silent conversation occurring just beyond the periphery of Noah’s understanding.
He waited. After a moment Jonas turned away and crawled gingerly across the floor to join him, reaching for a basin with soap and a rag they kept for washing, and Elisabeth’s hands and arms moved behind Jonas’s back to express her immense disapproval.
“It’s getting colder in here. Hurry up.”
She tucked her arms under the mound of blankets, finished with the conversation, and Noah laughed quietly. “Now I know how you feel,” he signed back, not attempting to conceal it from Jonas, and as Jonas poured steaming water into the basin Noah climbed slowly to his feet, groaning and stretching his limbs and rotating his joints until the coital tension released from them with a series of audible pops, and stepped over the muddy puddle on the floor to retrieve a canister of water on the table.
“You’re not running away again tonight, are you?”
“Still deciding,” said Jonas after a moment of thought. He covered his face with the steaming rag and inhaled deeply. “You?”
“Can’t,” said Noah simply. He had not realised how hoarse he had become. The water felt good in his throat, better than the rain had, helping wash away the lingering grittiness from the mud that had found its way into his mouth. He was more than eager to clean himself and return to bed once Jonas was finished. Some of the remaining dirt had crusted and flaked off of his skin, but something warm now dripped down his thigh that neither Noah nor Jonas could blame on the forest or the rain.
He glanced down at Jonas, who sat on the floor next to the fireplace, knees covered in ash and mud, his limp cock hanging down uncovered between his legs. The lingering mud stains on his torso gave the impression of having been caressed greedily by shadows whose marks had not yet faded. Jonas let the rag drop slowly from his face and met Noah’s gaze, his eyes shining with a strange yet somewhat more familiar hunger in the dark, and perhaps with something more that Noah would not comprehend until he understood Jonas a little better. The coals near his leg glowed a gentle red, promising to conceal a lingering warmth in the ashes for at least a while beyond the fire’s extinguishment. At the top of his shoulder, long scratches were still visible on his pale skin, a sentiment flushed with blood that would likely fade out of memory by morning.
Noah briefly considered offering to let Jonas fuck him again. Possibly with a second set of hands, one with sharper nails and cleverer fingers, in case they needed a little extra help.
In the quiet, the sound of dripping liquid on the floor drew Noah’s attention, though it was unapparent whether the sound came from the water in Jonas’s saturated rag or from himself.
The cabin roof above them was now silent.
Noah’s lips twitched, and Jonas’s chest expanded with an inhale as he prepared to speak, and before they could say anything at all the cabin shuddered around them as something thudded against one of the wooden walls, once and once again, slow and pointed and sending echoes of impatience rippling through the air.
Elisabeth, invisible beneath the blankets save for one exposed fist, knocked upon the wall in the corner a third time, and she did not need to do so again.