Chapter Text
"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?"
— Psalm 139:7
Tom woke with a name lodged in his throat like a splinter.
Not spoken. Never spoken. He tried to swallow, but his throat was a desert of dry salt. He focused on the ceiling fan, a skeletal silhouette that wasn't turning.
Just one full breath, he thought. One clean slide of oxygen.
He braced himself, fingers curling into the mattress until his nails bit through the cotton. He pulled. The air entered—thin, whistling, and jagged—hitting the snag behind his sternum with a dull, sickening pop of internal pressure. His eyes opened to darkness and found the sullen red pulse of his digital clock: 3:47 AM. He blinked, the darkness didn't just sit in the corners anymore; it began to vibrate.
The red numbers of the clock didn't just swim; they began to dissolve, dripping down the face of the nightstand like fresh paint.
He wasn't just awake.
He was being hollowed out.
In for four.
His right hand found his chest before he thought to move it — palm flat, fingers spread, pressing against the frantic percussion of his own ribs as though he could physically hold himself together.
The sheet beneath him was soaked through. It clung to the backs of his thighs, to the curve of his spine, cold and close as a second skin. The blankets were gone, kicked to the floor somewhere in the throes of it, and they lay in a pale heap near the foot of the bed, barely visible in the dark.
Out for four.
The room smelled of stale lager and the particular sourness of a body that had been sweating for hours without knowing it. The voice still lived in the hollow spaces behind his eyes.
Promise me you'll come back, Tom!
That accent. That specific, paper-thin crack at the edges of the words, like something dry being bent past its limit. His grip on the mattress snapped. His left hand tore free from the cotton, fingers cramping in the air, while his right abandoned his heart as if it were a lost cause. There was no holding the ribs together now, not when the sound was coming from behind them.
He didn't think; he reacted. He brought both hands up, heavy and desperate, and buried his face in them. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and ground them there until color bloomed against the dark—red, then orange, then a searing white—trying to push the sound out through sheer pressure.
It didn't work. It never worked. The voice simply waited, patient as sediment, settled somewhere too deep for pressure to reach.
He could still feel the fingers around his wrist.
Small. Trembling. Holding on with a kind of desperate, concentrated strength that only came from standing at the edge of something vast and knowing it. The grip had been so real — so vivid and particular, down to the tremor in the knuckles and the too-sharp press of fingernails — that Tom pulled his hands from his face and held his bare arm up in the dark, turning it slowly, half-certain he'd find bruises blooming purple against his skin.
Nothing.
Of course nothing.
His strength gave way. He let his arm drop back to the mattress; the cotton was damp beneath his elbow. The cold of it was a sharp, grounding reminder of the sweat, of the hours lost, of the fact that he was still—unbelievably—alone in the dark.
The cough, though. That had been real — hadn't it? A dry, rattling thing, vibrating up through the dream-grip and into Tom's bones, leaving behind the awful, specific certainty that whoever had been holding onto him was sick. Scared. Diminishing in some slow and irreversible way that no one was doing anything about.
Little prince.
The words surfaced and Tom's stomach turned to water. He lay there and felt it — the ice of recognition, spreading outward from somewhere central, reaching all the way to his fingertips. He didn't talk like that.
He was Tom. Cynical, perpetually dissolving-into-his-next-drink Tom, sharp-edged and deliberately faithless, who hadn't let gentleness near his tongue in — in —
He'd felt the words leave his mind. That was the part he couldn't shake loose. He'd felt them — the unfamiliar shape of them, soft and specific, like speaking a language he'd been fluent in once and had since buried under enough alcohol that he'd convinced himself he'd never known it at all.
"Fucking hell," he rasped.
The sound of his own voice — gravelled, flat, safely his — scraped through the silence and he held onto it. He pressed his feet to the floorboards, and the cold of them shot straight up through his heels, and he stayed there: sitting on the edge of the mattress, spine curved, hands hanging loose and useless between his knees, feet planted on something solid and real.
The clock moved. He watched it without meaning to.
Three fifty-one.
Three fifty-eight.
The adrenaline drained away in increments, replaced by a leaden, bone-deep exhaustion that settled over him like wet sand. His back began to cramp — a dull, rhythmic thrum that matched the grit in his eyes — but he didn't move. The shadows of the empty bottles on his desk stretched and shifted as the world outside began its slow turn toward morning, he watched them, he breathed, and he waited for the room to stop feeling like a stage he'd been placed on without anyone telling him the lines.
Four-fourteen.
Four-thirty-one.
He hadn't moved.
The grey arrived gradually — cautious, noncommittal, checking the corners of the room first before it committed to the walls. It came in through the gap in the curtains and painted everything the colour of old breath, of something left too long in a closed space. Tom sat in it and felt his heartbeat slowly descend to something almost ordinary.
A floorboard creaked in the hall. Then the particular percussion of the kitchen: a cupboard, a tap, the distant ceramic click of a mug set down on the counter. Matt, already up and moving through the flat with that frictionless, bounding warmth that Tom had never once been able to replicate and had long since stopped trying to understand. The normalcy of it — the coffee, the early morning, the presence of someone simply living on the other side of a wall — caught against something raw in Tom's chest and held there.
He turned toward the window.
The rising sun had found the glass of the house opposite and set it blazing — a hard, brilliant reflection that cut through his curtains in a single blade of light, laying itself across the floor, reaching almost to his feet. Tom stared into it until his vision spotted. Until the light became a smear, became nothing, became the retinal ghost of something that had already moved on.
The dream still clung to him.
Like a weight behind the ribs.
A promise extracted from him in a voice that had cracked on the edges of his name, by hands that had trembled and held on anyway.
He tore his gaze away; the floor was safer.
Tom stood stiffly, joints popping in sequence — knee, hip, the small of his back — and stood for a moment with his feet on the cold boards and his hands at his sides, adjusting to vertical. The sour wash of bile moved through him, brief and unpleasant, and he breathed through it. He didn't look back at the window. He didn't look at the bed.
He focused on the cold floor beneath his bare feet. On the prospect of caffeine. On the sounds of Matt in the kitchen, familiar, ordinary and blessedly, reliably present.
He padded toward the door.
Jon.
The name had been sitting on the tip of his tongue for — he checked the clock without wanting to — for three hours and forty-two minutes. Waiting. Folded there with a kind of patient pressure, like something that understood it would be spoken eventually and was content to wait him out.
Tom's hand found the door handle. Cold metal. Solid. Real.
He did not speak the name.
He opened the door instead, and stepped into the hallway, and let the smell of coffee and the ordinary sounds of morning close around him like water, and did not look back.