Chapter Text
Ryan has no one because of Naim—only Naim, and only because of him.
Like a snake swallowing its tail.
And here they are: a toilet block out of order and a quick piss in the relative privacy of a thicket of elms had been all it took. Barely out of sight, just across the street from the station, before Naim was startled by the sound of Ryan’s terror. Now the other boy stands here, pants half-zipped, staring Naim down with the fervor of a madman—seeking safety in Naim because who else would understand?
He’s stolen Ryan’s easy confidence and teasing smirk and replaced them with raw nerves and accumulating injuries.
“Stay with me,” Ryan demands, beneath the only tungsten light outside the station, the pace of his breath stolen by panic. With blood slowing to an ooze beneath one nostril and his shirt stretched stiff where a creature's hands seized it, Naim can do nothing but nod. The bruises on his own neck haven’t healed yet, devolving from a mottled purple to a sickly yellow, and earlier, when he gingerly swallowed Ryan’s offered Cherry Ripe, he found the matching wounds inside his throat.
“I mean it.” Ryan rasps, frantic—his eyes deepened by night, darting between Naim’s like he’d do something as stupid as disagree. Naim nods again, timidly, with his shoulders drawn so tight that the slope of them looks entirely overtaken by his dingy hoodie.
“You did this to me. So you — you have to stay.”
Naim flinches. He’s never felt so selfish as he does then, undeserving, like he’d made an impulsive prayer to a god who’d taken his greed for Ryan’s affection and warped it into the blight that it is.
Hunter is dead. Ryan has no alternative but Naim’s companionship — forced into proximity by fear of what will happen if they’re left as hopelessly alone as they were back home.
And it is Naim’s fault, all of this, Naim’s petty desire. He found one good thing when his mother uprooted their life in her search for salvation, and as psalms needled his skin, he found light in Ryan—then promptly smothered the blaze by trying to hold onto it.
Covetous.
A twisted version of Naim’s wish has been granted:
“I won’t leave,” Naim promises. He blinks away tears, glancing waywardly at incoming coach lights.
—
The brief relief he’d felt while nestled against Ryan’s heart after their reunion is long gone, and with the fresh, violent encounter and one more conversation avoided, every ache in him festers.
On the coach out of yet another village, with the promise that the next stop will come with a bed and a meal, Naim sits beside the window and watches dark, unfamiliar fields drag themselves past the glass.
You did this to me.
There are no real lights beyond the occasional farmhouse, only the black suggestion of fences and trees caught briefly in the headlights before being swallowed again. His reflection travels with him, faint and desaturated, layered over the night—and occasionally, often enough that Naim has come to expect it, the entity stands in the underbrush.
Stark white clothing against the dark. Tousled blond curls stealing the passing light. Its expression lost to the gloam.
Yet Naim knows it’s watching, waiting to rip him open like spoiled fruit. He hears the flies buzzing and feels himself rotting into something sticky-sweet and dripping, splitting down the middle.
The real Ryan sits close enough that their knees touch whenever the coach turns. Naim only presses back against him when the fear becomes a crawling, insidious thing, raising the fine hairs at his nape and burrowing into the bruises—the soft parts of him.
He’s always been a coward. To an entity feeding off desire—off fear—he can imagine its jaws snapping, its great maw drooling.
He must be a feast.
Naim watches Not-Ryan while dread builds and coils inside him, tightening until it crescendos into the roar of some great beast. He only reaches for the light at the last moment, when the fear stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like a prelude to the end; when it all becomes too much to bear.
Then Ryan catches like the flame of a lighter, sudden and warm in the darkness, and Naim presses his face to his chest.
—
Ryan’s been asleep for nearly an hour, his head resting against the seat and tilted toward Naim, who’s retreated into his own narrow space. Every few minutes, the road shifts beneath them, and Ryan’s shoulder slips against his, heavy and warm. Then the coach takes another bend and severs their slight connection before carrying them back together.
Naim doesn’t move away. He never moves away from these smaller intimacies, even when he should—but he has withdrawn where it matters most, and where he deserves the closeness least.
He hasn’t kissed Ryan since the silent car ride back from the ambush in the abandoned lot, with betrayal and every truth left unsaid for too long souring the air between them. He hasn’t playfully pushed into Ryan’s space solely in the hope of being wrestled down into the earth, their bodies pressed together with that new, unbearable urgency.
That requires trust, and Naim had only apologized to an entity. He’d laid bare a part of himself that he’s too terrified to reveal a second time.
The stakes feel higher now. The real Ryan might not understand. He might not forgive him, as he hadn’t that night in the car, because he hadn’t just been angry. He’d been finished.
Once, Ryan couldn’t even bring himself to look at Naim, but he sits beside him now because terror drove them toward the same station, because the entity hunted them in the dark and taught them the cost of solitude. Without that, Ryan wouldn’t be here. He would’ve found a way to live around Hunter’s absence and Naim’s betrayal.
He likely never would’ve sought Naim out again.
And so the conversation hasn’t been broached a second time. Perhaps it doesn’t claw at Ryan in the same way. Or perhaps Naim is simply the only person near enough for him to borrow comfort from.
Naim allows him that much.
He owes him that much.
Ryan’s ankle hooks around Naim’s beneath café tables. Ryan’s fingers find the back of his neck when they cross crowded stations. They share headphones, drinks, and blankets, along with the unspoken understanding that, during their coach naps, one of them will wake with his hand closed around the other’s wrist.
But Ryan hardly speaks to him. His stare is always hard and measuring, sharp enough to pare Naim down to whatever truth Ryan thinks is buried at his center.
Distrust.
Naim—Naim’s tired of dissecting it.
Ryan shifts in his sleep. His brow tightens, and the instant his breathing becomes shallow, Naim turns from the window.
“Ryan,” he says softly, because the other passengers are sleeping around them, their faces washed pale beneath the dim blue aisle lights.
Ryan doesn’t wake.
Naim places two fingers against the inside of his wrist, feeling for a pulse. It beats quickly beneath the skin.
“Ryan.”
Ryan’s breath shudders as his eyes open. For a second, he looks directly at Naim without recognition. His hand closes around Naim’s forearm hard enough to hurt, and something naked and terrified moves across his face before he manages to bury it.
Then his grip loosens.
“Sorry.”
It hurts to swallow.
Naim gulps down the budding ache and tells himself it’s an injury of a different kind, one that has nothing to do with the curse he’s saddled Ryan with—even in the furthest reaches of sleep.
“It’s all right,” he whispers. “But… what—”
Naim hesitates.
“Are you okay?”
Ryan looks around the coach, taking in the sleeping passengers, the empty aisle, and the driver’s distant silhouette. Only after that does he look through the window.
“M’fine.”
“You weren’t.” Naim’s mouth twists downward. “You were scared.”
Ryan swallows and looks away, only making the deepening hollows beneath his eyes more obvious.
“Wasn’t ’bout it.”
Naim doesn’t believe him, but he nods anyway—an act of acceptance, an admission that he might never be someone Ryan trusts with his fear again.
Even so, Ryan remains turned toward him. In the low light, Naim can still feel the scrutiny of his gaze.
“You’ve been awake,” Ryan says. “Staring out the window again.”
Naim shrugs and turns back toward the vast night plains. With unseeing eyes, he lies too.
“I slept earlier.”
Ryan scoffs. “No, you didn’t.”
Once, Naim would’ve smiled at being known so closely. Now the observation feels like evidence of his own stupidity, just like every moment he took with Ryan and made into something more, every look he sat and turned over, starry-eyed and naïve.
He’d let Ryan know him. Fed him every quirk and private thought, then mistaken that knowledge for affection—for reciprocation.
Ryan releases his arm, but instead of retreating, he lets his hand fall between them, palm turned upward upon the seat.
Naim looks at it, large and tan, the knuckles still somehow boyish despite their breadth.
He can still remember the first time Ryan sought him out. Not in the way Naim romanticized it afterward, softening every ill-fitting edge until it resembled a beginning, but as it truly happened: Ryan appearing beside him with that guarded expression and restless energy, pretending their meeting was incidental after crossing half the grounds to find him.
Naim fell in love with the possibility before Ryan offered him anything certain. A glance held too long. A shoulder nudged against his. The unfamiliar, electric quiet that descended whenever they were alone.
He mistook Ryan’s secrecy for intimacy and his hunger for devotion.
“C’mon,” Ryan urges.
Naim hesitantly places his hand in Ryan’s.
It’s what he owes him — the same solace Naim had once taken from Ryan when he showed up soggy and green with envy, twisting his hands in their pastor’s dining-room chair.
Ryan’s fingers close around his immediately, startling Naim from the thought.
Neither of them says anything more.
Outside, the fields turn to gum trees beneath the moon, and Naim watches his reflection with Ryan’s indistinct face hovering beside it, just waiting for one of them to change.
—
They get off the coach shortly before dawn in a town neither of them knows.
The station has a concrete platform, two vending machines, and a glass shelter fogged with early-morning condensation. Rain has passed recently, leaving the roads black and shining. The air smells of wet pavement, petrol, and distant salt.
Naim’s mother was right. It’s getting chilly, so if he leans further into Ryan’s warmth, he’s faultless.
—
Ryan buys Naim snacks at the servo, then carries both bags. Naim protests, but Ryan only looks at him and says,
“They’ll slow you down. You’re not walking behind me, yeah?”
So Naim walks beside him, ignoring the crinkle of the servo bag against his thigh whenever Ryan’s overloaded arm swings near him.
There’s a motel less than a kilometre from the station. Its sign has lost a letter, and the woman behind reception barely looks at them when Ryan pays in cash. She pushes a brass key across the counter and informs them that breakfast is instant coffee, white bread, and margarine served between six and eight. They’ll likely sleep through it.
“… Where’d you get the money?” Naim asks. He can’t help it, eyes darting from the motel entrance to Ryan, who impatiently tugs him forward by his sweater’s zipper.
“Landscaping.”
“You’re a landscaper?” Naim feels lulled into a different space, somewhere they haven’t visited since reuniting at that bus stop in that shit-hole town. “In what way?”
“Was.” Ryan huffs, looking just as unmoored by a question that isn’t haunted by lingering trepidation— by reflections of themselves, deliberately hostile, instead of foolishly destructive, “cut grass. Dug holes. Got yelled at by retirees ‘bout their roses.”
Ryan tries to smile in that easy, crooked way, teeth white and perfect. It doesn’t fit his face tonight.
I didn’t know, Naim wants to say. He chews on the words bitterly and swallows another mouthful of ache.
—
The room is on the ground floor. Ryan insists he check it first.
He pulls the curtains closed, then opens them again, dissatisfied with the reflection in the glass. He looks behind the bathroom door, beneath both beds, and inside the wardrobe, although the wardrobe is barely deep enough to hide a coat. He searches as though the presence looming over them is a childhood bogeyman — predictable and obliging enough to hide beneath a bed.
Naim stands in the doorway with their bags at his feet.
“Nothing’s here,” he says.
Ryan glances at him. “You don’t know that.”
"You're kidding." Naim's nose wrinkles. “Like it hides under beds?”
Ryan slams a drawer shut and he’s brought back to the clang of metal – of hauling closed the mill’s roller door as the entity inside screeched.
“We don’t fucking know what it does.”
They know enough. It appears when one of them is alone. It wears the shape of the person they want and uses intimacy like a skeleton key. It understands voices, gestures, and private expressions that no stranger should know — a cuckoo hatched inside their memories.
Sometimes it’s wrong in small ways, and that wrongness is obvious immediately — other times it is only obvious once it’s spilled blood.
“Don’t stand out there.” Ryan crosses the room and catches Naim by the sleeve, pulling him fully inside before closing the door. Naim blinks, yanked from his thoughts.
“I was in the doorway.”
“You were outside.”
“You could see me.”
The muscle in Ryan’s jaw flexes once before he angrily swings his duffel onto a bed.
“That isn’t the fuckin’ point and you know it.”
Naim exhales harshly. His frustration sharpens into a petulant laugh and a roll of his eyes.
“Then what is the point?”
Ryan stares at him, eyes hardening. The argument arrives often now, always wearing a different face. A bathroom door closed too far, or Naim walking several steps ahead in a servo. Each time, Ryan reacts as though Naim has stepped deliberately into traffic.
“The point,” Ryan says, quieter now, “is that you don’t get to decide when it’s safe. Yeah?”
Chastened, Naim looks away. The guilt is always there, but sometimes it shifts beneath his ribs, becoming anger if only because anger is easier to carry.
“It isn’t safe because of me.” He says, and his lungs punch out a wounded sound, all the breath leaving with his admission.
“... What?”
“I’ve been thinking about it and," Naim's lashes flutter, and he hopes they'll keep his tears at bay, "– you think – you think, just because I’m here,”
“Naim. Don’t.”
“Hunter wasn’t — wasn’t safe. I was so close to him when it happened, and he wasn’t safe either.” Naim stares at the bag, brows gathered, jaw quivering.
He thinks of Hunter’s father, driven away by the grief of his son’s death, leaving his wife alone with two gaping, infected wounds: the child she lost and the husband who abandoned her. He thinks of Hunter’s sister’s righteous fury, sharp enough to send two teenagers into an abandoned lot to answer for what they’d done.
His mother wouldn’t grieve that way. He has no one who would.
“He should be here.” Naim’s voice quakes with the truth that the entity embedded in his throat with dirty fingers. “Not me.”
Ryan goes still.
There are many things they haven’t discussed, and Hunter exists at the center of them all like a haunting neither boy will acknowledge.
“... Hey.” Ryan moves the bags aside carefully. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Naim closes his eyes, exhaustion sweeping through him, acceptance a depressing conclusion.
“Nothing.”
“Naim.”
“I said nothing.”
“For fuck’s sake. You meant something.”
Naim moves toward the bathroom. Ryan follows before he has taken two steps.
“You don’t need to come in,” Naim says.
“Yes, I do.”
“I’m just washing my face.”
“Naim.”
“You’ll be able to see me from the bed.”
Ryan’s expression changes. It’s slight, but Naim has learned to recognize the moments when fear wraps itself around him. Ryan’s face becomes calmer rather than more frightened. His voice lowers, and his shoulders straighten, as though preparing to absorb a blow. It's reminiscent of the way Hunter stood in the dark lot.
“What if it isn’t me on the bed?”
Naim has no answer.
—
Ryan leans against the bathroom door while Naim washes beneath the unflattering, fluorescent light. The tap coughs brown water before clearing. Naim bends over the sink, splashing his face until the cold makes his teeth ache. Then he takes a mouthful and swishes it around, tasting copper, feeling the sting of scratch marks at the back of his tongue.
When he looks up, Ryan is visible in the mirror behind him. For one sharp second, Naim can’t breathe.
Ryan sees it happen.
“It’s me.”
"Yeah." Naim grips the edge of the sink. "I know.”
Ryan comes closer, stopping before their bodies touch.
“How?”
Naim stares at him through the mirror.
It's a question they have begun asking whenever fear enters a room. How do you know? Give me something it wouldn’t know. Prove that you’re not the thing wearing the person I can’t refuse.
There’s only instinct, and instinct has nearly killed them both.
Naim turns around and Ryan is close enough that Naim can see the new, small cut near his lower lip and the shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes. His hair is damp from the rain. He looks familiar in all the ways that once made familiarity feel safe.
Naim turns back toward the sink. Ryan remains behind him.
“You should sleep,” he says. “First time we’ve had a bed instead of an overnight coach.”
“... First time we’ve had a shower that wasn’t communal.” Naim tries to laugh, tries to tug at the weight he dropped on them both. Ryan steps forward. “Or a washer to use. My clothes are disgusting.”
“We could shower.”
Naim nods at the suggestion, clarifying, “We can take turns by the curtain.”
“… Then we can push the beds together. Get a full eight?”
“No.” The answer comes too quickly. Silence settles over the bathroom.
Ryan looks at him through the mirror again.
“We’ve been sleeping beside each other.”
“On coaches.”
Ryan’s jaw sets, only a slight hesitation before he forges forward with a defiance that Naim doesn’t understand. He holds a hand out instinctively, as if he needs to hold the other boy back by his looming chest. Ryan looks down at him, gaze demanding an explanation that Naim won't humiliate himself further by offering.
“What’s the difference?”
There’re many differences. A coach is public, brightly lit, and full of strangers. Their bodies can lean together without either of them having to name it. A motel bed is private — a motel bed makes Naim’s stomach twist in longing.
Naim dries his face on the thin towel.
“I’ll take that one,” he says, indicating the smaller bed – the one closest to the door and furthest from the window. He’s had his fill of windows. “You shower first.”
Ryan watches Naim turn his eyes away as he pulls off his shirt.
They do not push the beds together.