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i.
There is a patch of well-trodden earth between the trees, a stamped-out square of mud and fallen leaves. They come upon it by mistake, lost in the monstrous trunks of redwoods and the passing shadows of clouds.
But for a moment, the sun shines. For a moment, the world pauses as they stand together at the altar of something homely. Something that has doubtless been disturbed many thousand times over but still feels magical for the sole reason of filling a need held in the breaths they’ve shared every morning.
“Here,” Sebastian says, their wooden fingertips brushing against the breeze-cool skin of Yosh’s forearm.
“Here,” Yosh echoes.
When Sebastian looks at him, they see architecture in the making. Yosh does not look back, not right away; his eyes scan the ground for measurements, seeking out a floorplan underfoot. He steps forward, just enough to get a better look but not enough to leave Sebastian’s space. He drags his walking stick in the mud, a demarcation of something. An acknowledgement of what will come.
“The door ought to stand here,” he says. With his free hand, he motions to one side. “The bedroom will be off to that side.”
Wonderment fills Sebastian’s chest like starlight. “Why is that?”
“So that we may wake up to the sunrise.” Yosh finally turns his head to meet Sebastian’s gaze, and he is not smiling but he is joyful, pink petals peeking through a flower bud. “So that I may see you painted in pink and orange each day, and know that we are safe.”
It is not forever. They both know this. One day, time will begin to pass once more and they will find themselves painted hues of fire-red in the shadows of a hidden sun. For today, though, they need not acknowledge that. For today, Sebastian will be whatever color Yosh would like to see.
ii.
The cabin does not look like much. It was never meant to, really; this is a temporary shelter at best, and though Sebastian can feel Yosh in every square inch of it, they know it is not a thing to hold onto. The windowpanes and rafters will belong to someone else, one day; that is the way of things.
The door, with its carvings of songbirds and flora, is a massive beast that took endless hours of practiced work, each of Yosh’s hands nicked and pricked and stiff at the end of every day. Sebastian wants to steal it from its hinges and hide it away, to take it somewhere no one will know of it but the two of them. They do not; instead, they run their hands over every inch, an attempt to memorize how it feels to exist within the confines of something built with borrowed time.
They wake to the birds every morning, and Yosh follows suit. The room is full to bursting with a love too delicate to put a name to. They do not try.
Instead, Sebastian makes tea while Yosh cooks. Instead, they walk through the door and into the forest, crushing berries and foliage underfoot. Instead, Yosh presses his lips to the curve of Sebastian’s forehead and mutters their name, an oath and a prayer all at once. A request to whoever may be listening for just one more summer, one more year. Sebastian understands; they often ask for the same.
There is a cabin in the middle of the woods. It is a home and a shelter from the things that haunt them. It will not last forever, but it will have to be enough.
iii.
The clay is unwieldy in Sebastian’s stiff hands, a thing of great resistance. They have seen this done a dozen times, seen the way fingers can pull and shape the wet mound into lilting hills and valleys. A steady movement, a stable hand. That is all they thought was required, a bill they could meet without question. And yet they struggle still with the motion of it, with making the material bend to their will.
Sebastian has never envied Yosh’s delicate scalpel with such intensity.
“Like so,” Yosh says, hand guiding the wood of Sebastian’s thumb through the clay. A broad, sweeping indentation follows, from the center to the outer ridge. The dense, wet material collects on their joined fingers. “A light pressure, darling, nothing more.”
“I think,” Sebastian mutters, and they know their brow is furrowed despite their best efforts, “I may perhaps prefer being made to making.”
Yosh laughs, breath like a breeze on the wood of Sebastian’s neck. “Or perhaps we have not found your preferred medium. Have you considered basket-weaving?”
“We do not need more baskets.” Already, the shelves of the kitchen overflow with woven branches, a collection resulting from idle hands and limited access to power tools. “What we need is dishware.”
Yosh presses his lips to the slope of Sebastian’s shoulder, and they can feel his smile like the curve of the sun cresting over the horizon. “I can carve them, if that is what it comes to.”
“You ought to allow yourself the dignity of accepting a gift from someone else, here and there,” Sebastian says. They move their hand once more to the center of the clay, trying to imitate the motion Yosh had shown them. A light, even pressure, from the center to the edge.
The bowl is a clumsy thing, when it is all said and done. Sebastian’s thumbs crease the edges and leave indentations along its curvature. Yosh does not mind; he places it in the center of their small table and proclaims it the finest thing he has ever seen.
iv.
A decade passes while they are not looking. It is more time than they expect, and less than they have earned. There is a canyon now, a vast emptiness between then and now, created by days spent lying in the grass and counting the branches overhead.
A clumsily-knit blanket warms their shared bed. Paintings adorn the walls, made with messy hands and brushes they’d carved together. An old bowl sits in the center of the kitchen table like a prized possession, riddled with clumsy thumbprints.
But these things are not talismans. These things, borne of love, were never going to hold off the inevitable. Regardless of the world they have built for themselves, they must return to that which held them before.
When Sebastian wakes, they find a jersey folded neatly on the workbench in their bedroom. They let Yosh lace it up for them with his nimble, scarred fingers, and they tie his cleats in return. Together, they collect what things they may carry in their arms and cross the threshold one last time, into a world that will not care for them in the way forests always have.
v.
“You ought to be exhausted,” Sebastian says. Their hands work over the muscles of Yosh’s back, freckles cast like constellations on the vast expanse.
The game pits them against one another, and this is neither new nor a surprise. But to have pitched both teams, to stay on the mound consistently as the feedback tears a body between one reality and another, is new. It is not something Sebastian would like to see repeated; it is not something they would have wanted Yosh to endure in the first place.
“I ought to be in a forest somewhere,” Yosh sighs, one hand reaching back to graze Sebastian’s forearm. “In a cabin, with my woodworking and little else but you.”
Sebastian smiles. “Yes, well,” they say, and leave it at that.
It is a quiet moment amongst many louder ones. It is hearing unfamiliar water crash against unfamiliar sand, and it is pretending that nothing has changed. They will go to bed together in the evening, and in the morning Sebastian will once again be away from him. That is the way of the world, the way it must be.
For now, there is this. The hands Yosh carved himself, kneading at the knots in his back with a steady pace and even pressure. As though nothing has changed, and nothing ever will.
vi.
“It is not so long until the next siesta,” Yosh says. His fingers are rough with dried saltwater, rubbing against Sebastian’s arm. “We will have time then.”
Sebastian allows themself a moment to consider it, to picture once again spending time in the cabin and worrying about nothing but whether the windows will hold through a passing storm. “I suppose we will.”
They lay on the beach in blessed solitude, the stars stretching out overhead endlessly. Sebastian feels untethered, driftwood pushed out to sea; very little is familiar about this place, other than Yosh in the sand beside them.
“I do not enjoy being parted from you so often,” Yosh presses on. His grip is not quite ironclad, but it is a constant pressure, a vine wrapped tight around Sebastian. “I had forgotten how it felt to worry.”
The worry is a constant in a way nothing else is. In the face of eclipses and floodwater, the worry is a wily beast gnawing on the branches of Sebastian’s chest. It skitters around their body no matter how they try to fend it off, and it does not care what marks it leaves on the exposed wood. Though Yosh’s gentle hands can smooth it away for a time, it is only a few hours before it once again sets to scratching.
“If you would let me,” Sebastian says, leaning their head against Yosh’s shoulder, “I would grow to be your armor, to keep you safe within me always.”
Yosh laughs. It is a quiet thing, the flutter of a moth’s wings. “I could never allow that, my dear Woodman,” he mutters.
“I know.”
The waves crash against the shore in a steady lullaby, frothy foam stretching over the sand. Tomorrow, Sebastian will once again be in some distant city. But for tonight, there is this. It is enough.
vii.
There was always a risk.
Sebastian was under no illusion as to the ways in which the forces of the world would converge upon them. They are a living thing, but they are a wooden thing, too, and it is only natural for wood to burn.
They do not turn to see it. There is no reason to. Sebastian has seen this scene play out dozens of times, the sun in front of the moon, a fire roaring to life. The best they might do is allow themself a quiet, shaky breath, to dig their heels into the earth and pretend that they do not know.
There was time and time enough to make peace with this. It is not anyone else’s fault that they failed to do so, that they felt the air filling the cavity of their chest and the sap pulsing beneath their stiff bark and held on, that they grasped tightly to wood-worn hands and pretended it would be forever.
This, as with everything else, was only ever a temporary thing. This, as with leaves turning brown in the face of winter chills, as with flowers wilting under the coming snow, was not meant to last.
Even now, Sebastian allows themself one last desperate, foolish hope. They hope there is enough left behind for Yosh to remember them by.
And then the world is bright, and they do not think much at all.
viii.
There is a man standing in the doorway of a cabin. His shoulders are branches under heavy snowfall, his spine bent like a weeping willow. His shadow fills the doorframe and casts the room in a midnight darkness, and he watches over it with eyes too dark to read.
Yosh runs a hand over the carvings of the front door. The songbirds nestled in tree branches, the roses and lilies. They are foreign now, the shape of something he cannot reach.
He turns away and casts his eye toward overcast skies. There is nothing but an empty silence in the treetops; perhaps that is fitting.
Yosh takes a steadying breath and closes the door. He knows without a doubt that he will not open it again.
ix.
A home sits empty with nothing to fill it. Sunlight filters through the windows and onto a sturdy wooden bedframe, crawls its way across the packed-dirt floor with reaching fingers. There is nothing to interrupt its journey into the kitchen, decorated even now with baskets and bowls and wooden spoons. It touches everything, hovers, dances its way through a space left as a monument to a love once shared in peace and quiet.
Slowly, grass begins to creep its way up to the doorway. Squirrels and rabbits and mice work their way inside through the nooks and crannies, claiming stores of seeds and nuts and dried fruits as their harvest. The well goes unused, the rope holding its basket begins to rot, and birds make nests in the chimney.
Dirt and dust collect on the counters and tables in equal measure. The door sits ajar in its frame, wood swollen with recent rains.
This was always its fate. This was what was meant to be. The home does not lament its losses; that is a task best left for the living.