Chapter Text
Four years later.
***
Nicky, juggling three thermoses in his arms and trying to locate his keys by jumping and listening hard for which pocket jangles, nearly screams when he jumps and lands on something soft.
“Jesus!” he shouts. “God, you’re so lucky I didn’t spill any of this.”
Erik winces, shaking some feeling back into his foot. “Why are you using echolocation to find the keys? You could’ve put those down.”
Nicky, who isn’t about to explain to Erik for the hundredth time why putting your personal things on the floor is disgusting, asks instead, “Where is everybody?”
“Downstairs. Louisa is helping them empty their cars.” He thinks for a moment. “I think her parents bought us a horse.”
“Fuck.” Nicky jiggles his leg. “Hey, do you mind opening the door? Front pocket.”
Erik fishes in his pocket and pulls out the keyring. He takes his thermos back from Nicky before opening the door.
With Louisa’s help, they managed to clean out the musty smell from their new apartment, repainted the walls, and set up most of their furniture. Their kitchen is small enough that their fridge barely fits between the oven and the wall, but when the sunlight streams in through the living room windows, it reminds Nicky of the Kloses’ home. He thinks it carries the same music, the kind responsible for making places of worship sacred, the kind that makes love swell in Nicky’s chest.
“Ready?” Erik asks.
Nicky smiles. “Yeah.”
Louisa’s parents did not, in fact, buy them a horse.
They brought them a bookshelf, which Erik is genuinely excited over and which Nicky pokes at cautiously, wondering if it's old enough that it’ll collapse as soon as Erik puts books in it. Louisa tells him it was handmade by her grandparents and to stop glaring at it like he thinks Erik will leave him for it.
Mr. and Mrs. Klose give them a collection of silly, mismatched dinnerware. Father Magno buys them a fern bigger than both Erik and Nicky stacked together. Louisa buys them a hamper full of essentials because “You two are stupid enough not to have thought of that.”
Neither of them wants to be the one to tell her she’s right. They accept the gift without a word.
The rest of the night goes by within a heartbeat. Nicky is too busy laughing and reveling in everyone’s company to realize how late it is, and before he’s caught his breath, the dishes from dinner are clean and dried, the trash is taken out, the gifts stuffed away. Louisa is passed out across their beanbags. In the kitchen, Erik and Father Magno talk about their poetry collections as Erik walks him to the door. (Nicky’s life is obviously destined to be lousy with nerds.)
The Kloses are the last to leave. After Nicky successfully dumps Louisa in the guest room, Mrs. Klose drags Nicky in for a fierce kiss, leaving a blurry red lipstick mark on his cheek. “Look at you,” she murmurs.
“Thank you,” he says, his hands gripping her by the biceps. He’s said it a thousand times over the years, but it’s never enough.
She stops him before he can go on. “I don’t want to hear it.” Gently, she brushes a few stray hairs out of Nicky’s face, the way she sometimes does to Erik or Louisa or her husband.
That night, Nicky falls into bed grinning like a fucking idiot. When Erik asks him about it, Nicky shrugs and drags him under the covers, pulling him close. He’s smiling too wide for the kiss to be anything more than a simple press of mouths, but Erik doesn’t complain. Instead, he huffs a laugh and allows it, skating his fingers down Nicky’s back until they fall into a deep, blissful sleep.
***
Maria calls.
***
He doesn’t think about it.
Rarely. He rarely thinks about it, until he lets himself consider it, which means he starts thinking about it constantly.
Except he doesn’t want to. He and Erik finally, finally have their own apartment. There’s a stray dog by their building Erik has a terrible weak spot for, they still haven’t figured out how to use the downstairs laundry machine, and they have to use a cheap electric fan to keep the air circulating—but it’s theirs.
He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about the fact that it’s been years since he saw his parents, and if he gives in, he’ll be face-to-face with them with no one guarding his back in less than a week. He doesn’t want to think about how scared that makes him, how he’s expecting them to push a knife sweetly between his shoulder blades. He doesn’t want to think about how he told Father Magno this morning he only expects things would be weird, but in reality, the second he looks at Maria he’s going to forgive her for everything and he knows it.
Instead, he wants to listen to Erik bitch about whatever bad manuscript he’s correcting and gush about the really good ones, curled up on the couch with the cat mug his parents gave them as a housewarming gift. He wants to pay a stupid amount of money to find out what the fuck is wrong with their AC and he wants to have breakfast with Louisa on the weekends. He wants to sit on their rickety balcony and watch the sky yawn to life. He wants to go to Sunday mass and talk to Father Magno until Erik calls him and asks him to come home.
He should stay, he tells himself. He might be Catholic, but he can’t starve himself with only his guilt to gnaw on for the rest of his life. Sacrifice doesn’t make him holy.
He should stay. That’s what anyone would say if he asked. There are some things you can only walk away from. There are some things better left in the past.
He thinks about Maria.
He waits until Erik comes back from work.
Put simply, all hell breaks loose.
It reminds Nicky of this phrase Father Magno likes: Siguete haciendo el gracioso. Keep playing funny. If Maria had the chance to be the mom she wanted to be, Nicky imagines she would’ve said that to him a lot. He’s never known how to shut the hell up. Even now, twenty-one years old and scared out of his mind, he still thinks cracking a few good lines will get him out of the way Erik is glowering at him as if he thinks Nicky is being unreasonable when this is the only decision that makes any goddamn sense.
Nicky doesn’t know when he started raising his voice, but he’s definitely shouting when he says, “You just don’t get it. You don’t understand.”
Erik—who never loses his temper—looks at Nicky now with tears of frustration. He lifts his chin a little, defiant. “You’re right. I don’t understand it. Didn’t you want this?” He throws his hands up. “Aren’t you happy?”
“Are you serious right now?”
“Then I can’t comprehend why you would even consider this. Look,” he says, folding one leg under himself, then the other, “I’m on my knees. I’m begging. Don’t go.”
“Don’t do that to me.” Nicky’s throat is sticky and useless at this point. How the words get past his teeth is beyond him. He stumbles one, two, three steps back when Erik reaches for him. “No. Why are you so upset about this? Maybe everything will be fine. Maybe this will all turn out to be one big fucking mistake and I’ll be back within a month.”
“Because I know you, Nicky!” he cracks in, nearly yelling. It stuns Nicky into snapping his mouth shut. “And you don’t know how to love people by halves. You’ll go, you’ll take one look at those kids, and you’ll stay.”
They stand there for a moment, staring at each other. Even after four years, they’ve never found themselves in this situation. Nicky’s always chosen Erik over everything and everyone. He’s the first thing he’s ever wanted badly enough to disobey his parents. Nicky would turn his back on God before he ever turned his back on Erik. It’s always been Erik. Erik is family.
But these kids are family, too. They’re teenagers who barely know each other and have a thousand different issues between them. He knew his Aunt Tilda was shady and rough around the edges, but he didn’t know she was sick and beat her son. He didn’t know she gave birth to twins and orphaned one of them, and he doesn’t know how much Luther knew about it, either, but there’s no doubt in Nicky’s mind that Luther will take them in if he doesn’t.
(There's nothing more important than family, Nicholas.)
And Nicky can’t let that happen. Even if it hurts Erik, even if it means Erik looks at him like he’s never seen him before—he can’t.
“I have to go,” he says. He’s not shouting anymore. He’s just so, so tired. “There’s no alternative.”
Erik’s legs eat up the space between them. He scoops up Nicky’s hands and brushes his lips over his knuckles. “Yes, there is.”
“I can’t live with that,” he admits. It hurts him to say it, and it hurts Erik to hear it, but all he does is nod.
“Yeah,” he says, resigned. “I know.”
***
Nicky shows up at the airport with his plane ticket in one hand and Erik’s sweaty palm in the other. Nicky’s hair is slicked back, his shirt buttoned up and tucked neatly into his pants. The prodigal son returns.
"Let me come with you," Erik says.
"Don't be stupid. It doesn't suit you." Nicky searches his face. "This is your home. I'm not going to ask you to leave it."
"Home is wherever you are," he says without a trace of hesitation or irony or anything short of earnestness. Nicky is hit hard with the realization that if he asked Erik to come with him right now, Erik would do so in a heartbeat.
For one guilty split-second, the word yes balances on the tip of his tongue. He swallows it down before it has the chance to slip past his teeth.
Maybe Erik could start anew, maybe where they live honestly doesn’t matter to him—but this is what Nicky knows for a fact: There are all kinds of fucked-up shit waiting for him on the other side of this, and he doesn't want any of it touching Erik. There's a difference between leaving Eden and being banished from it. Even if it’s selfish, Nicky wants Germany to still seem like paradise when he comes back.
Erik pulls Nicky into his orbit, and Nicky lets himself savor the easy sensation of stepping into Erik's space, breathing him in as Erik plants a lingering kiss on his hairline.
Nicky shakes his head, willing the creases between his brows to go away. "No."
Erik unwraps his fingers from around the meat of Nicky's arms. He nods, his mouth twisted. "Okay," he murmurs. "Just promise me you'll come back. I don't care about anything else, but I—just come back."
"Where else would I go?” He soaks in the sight of Erik, trying to commit every detail to memory. He runs a thumb absentmindedly over Erik’s pulse. “Hey. While I’m gone? Stop feeding that fucking dog.”
He waves Nicky off. “You like her.”
“You like strays,” he accuses. “Stop feeding the dog.”
“Okay,” Erik says, grinning like the filthy fucking liar he is.
Nicky can’t stand goodbyes, so he just stands there for a moment, wishing for—he doesn’t know. Time. He wishes for time. One last look, one last kiss, one last chance.
“I’ll see you later,” he says finally.
Then he lets go.
***
"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,
for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes [...]"
— Romans 1:16.
***