leaving you starving
Mar 31, 2024 18:19:48 GMT -5
Post by gamemaker kelsier on Mar 31, 2024 18:19:48 GMT -5
1.
His hand slips off the table, the movement wakes him.
He's slow in it, the coming to. Feels a little like falling. Then his eyes are open and Nemo's staring at a shaft of moonlight cutting across the kitchen table. His hand closes in a fist over the beam of light but he comes away with nothing, cold and empty.
"Oh," he murmurs.
His brow furrows, he pushes himself up and shakes off the last dregs of sleep, then winces and presses his palm into his shoulder. He fell asleep on a book again, he's been making a habit of that lately.
Nemo stands and swings his arms around, pacing and stretching as he waits.
Tate still isn't home.
That's normal. He works through most nights. That never used to be a problem because Nemo did too. Now, time melts like sinking ships.
His father died two months ago, then his mother three weeks later. After she got through the worst of the withdrawal symptoms, she took one look at Nemo and couldn't find her son past the scar on his face. Years of crippling morphling addiction made her fragile.
She stopped eating. He begged her to try but she couldn't.
Ken said it was the guilt.
It was stupid of him to think that there'd ever be a different outcome. Tate had tried to save him from the pain of it but Nemo was too stubborn to listen. He always was- Tate wasn't the first to try.
"You can cry," Tate had told him when Nemo came home that first night, a suitcase gripped in his hand with the last of his things from his childhood home. Nemo didn't though, not then and not a few days later at her funeral. He still hasn't, it feels like he's stuck two months back, when they were still alive and he could keep putting off grieving them, though he can feel something building.
He doesn't pursue it, just waits for it to come to a head.
He doesn't know what else to do and mainly because if Tate's not around, Nemo just lays there feeling out of place.
The Seraphim house is strange to him. There are touches left over from a mother that loved them, cobwebs that the brothers refuse to clear because they remind them of her, they miss her.
Herbs hang drying from the kitchen ceiling, tea leaves in the window, the walls lined with jars of different blends that Tate's made. There's one on the shelf with Nemo's name on it, a quiet sign that Tate loves him. Even now, when he turns his head, he can see it there, half-full. He never liked tea until he tasted it.
The house is warm in the winter. There's always food in the fridge. When everyone's home it's loud, but it's good, it's happy loud.
There's all this knowledge built up inside him, a set of rules he's written over the years on how to take up space. Noise was never a good thing growing up but silence was somehow worse, Nemo always tried to skate along some sort of middle ground.
When voices rise, Nemo shrinks, shoulders caving inwards in an attempt to make himself invisible. He positions himself near exits, presses his back to walls, one foot out the door.
Then Tate's arm loops around his waist, he pulls Nemo in against his side and he remembers that he's safe. Just one touch, the light feeling of his boyfriend's fingers against his scar, his breath on the back of his neck, a knowing smile and he's home.
The restlessness stays, in the same way that it always has. He's not good at being known like this, despite always secretly wanting to be. Nobody told him about the way that love can strip you down, exposing you to the core. His heart twists in ways it never did before he met Tate.
There's a precious, tight feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he looks at him. It's like cupping water in his hands. A quiet question, perched on the tip of his tongue, 'how long do I have until you slip through my fingers?'
He watches the small hand shift slowly onto the two.
Nemo gets up to put the kettle on. The wooden handle's well-worn, scratched up and splitting on the edges, a love language transcribed over time.
He doesn't miss his mother.
