hold me like we're dying from the liquor that we drank

NATE

”The cliffs.” Nate agrees, glad that they’ve come to a consensus, glad that it was easy, though if he really thought about it he’d realize this decision would only narrow things down so much. In his head though, they agree, and he can see a new house, on the cliffs over the ocean, nothing around them, nothing bothering them. A sanctuary, that he wants to reach out and grasp now. One that manages to light some torch of comfort, burning in the back of his mind, easing him over thoughts of his father and Sunjata’s silence, until he can ask his question.

Nate hears the unsteady thump of the other mans heart, feels the way he stiffens, thinks. He wonders absently how many moments Sunjata is sitting through, what horror will rise to the top. He doesn’t expect the answer to horrify him though, doesn’t expect to be so affected by it.  ”No.” Nate mumbles softly, ineffectively into his finances neck, his arms now clinging, fingers greedily digging into whatever they can, short hair and blankets both. He wouldn’t let it happen, wouldn’t let Sunjata be that person, even in his thoughts, even in a hypothetical. It’s a pretty thought, at its core, but even something pretty can get dingy, broken, if it steeps in darkness long enough.

If Nate notices the repeat of his question, he gives no indication of it, his brow furrowing against Sunjata’s skin as he thinks. There’s a dozen choices he’s made that he wishes he could undo, a dozen things he wishes to change, but the biggest one, the one that still made him feel weak, and stupid, cane to his kind, his lips easily. ”I would have stuck with school.” Nate stops there, the rest of the story in his head, aimed towards Sunjata as if they’re able to communicate silently all the time. It feels like it, right now, more and more often, but eventually it clicks, he realizes he’s going to have to speak out loud. ”After Bart, I... I tried to go back, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do a lot. But I needed money, and... dad was always good for that.” And from there, he’d just slipped, collapsed back into the pit of his upbringing, never to leave again. Until he came here. Until he found someone willing to help lift him up, help him tear down the walls around him.

Until Sunjata.

The thought fills him with all kinds of warmth, his body overflowing with it, overheating because of it. Just like that, the shadows are left behind, burned away into nothing, and a question that’s worlds away (literally) from the last one slips from him. ”What kind of food was there in Korofi?” A roundabout way of asking what Sunjata’s favourite was, what he could try to replicate, when he was allowed near a kitchen again. When they had a kitchen again.

the last ones here on earth