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The cabin is isolated.
It feels— rotten.
Øystein isn't sure where he's come from; he thinks he's always been here. It is empty and quiet, but there are people all around — there are presences lingering, not ghosts but energies, disturbances. He feels the skin of everyone who has lived here, and everyone who has stepped foot here, and everyone who ever will.
The floorboards creak under his weight, but the outside is silent. Curtains shut him off from the vague, bright light beyond the window panes, and the idea of challenging them is unnerving.
He can feel his heart pulsing in his throat, and the sweat from his some-reason sore muscles. If he looked down, he would have no body, but his hands materialize when he walks towards the lower-floor bathroom and pushes it open.
He wakes up after he finds Pelle. He is trembling and drenched; Øystein sees he is home, is in his bed in Krakståd, and begins to panic that he was not dreaming — or that he still is. Forcing himself to sit up against the leaden weight around his collarbones helps ground him. His head rushes, ears privy to a waterfall of blood that's seemingly pooled in his skull. He feels a drop in the air, realizes it's his heartrate plummeting back to normal, and wipes his face with his palms.
"Jesus," he mutters. He realizes he must have been crying; it's still hard to breathe, and his voice sounds hoarse in the way it always does.
Not that he much remembers the last time he did it — cried. It must have been years.
The room is swaddled in dull cool-light from the cracks of the tarp pinned above his windows and the balcony door. Chill and heat always seeped through it, and so he leaves it covered most of the year. Tonight is no different, the air quickly drying his sweat when he tosses the covers off to sit on the edge of his bed. When his feet hit the floor, bare on wood, he stares at his hands and feels his eyes burning.
Why the fuck would he dream that?
Why was that dream so strange?
He's never be able to move himself in his dreams, nor feel everything so particularly. It was, too, a perfect rendition of the house. His dreams are always eighty-percent accurate at best — in a normal one, the house might be one story or maybe four, Jørn's apartment might be on the second floor, or the stairs may be missing. His brain never let him live inside a memory like that. Perhaps it's that which bothers him; he's never seen Pelle... dead.
How was it so real?
He peels his boxers off and takes new ones from his drawer, his shirt replaced next. He hasn't washed his laundry in a few weeks, and the Venom shirt is the last one clean, as much as he hates to wear the thing outside an occasion.
Pelle's room is much smaller, his door half the wall it lays on. He knocks first, tries the handle; it's unlocked. They had argued earlier and he expected otherwise.
He isn't sure what he wants as he slowly opens it. Part of his belly is scared — really scared, the kind he felt waking up unsure yet where his consciousness lay. He feels real, and alive, enough.
Pelle is laying on his stomach snoring like a locomotive. It makes him smile some. It used to make him want to rip his ears off, frankly, but now it helps him sleep when he— well, feels like this.
That isn't often.
"Pelle?" He says, quiet. There's no way he could hear him over his revving even if he were awake. "Pelle."
The man stirs. His breath catches, and then he opens up onto his side. He sees he's fallen asleep half naked, long sleeve barely covering him. "Øystein?" He rubs his face, hard. "What do you want?"
"I know you're still pissed at me," he disclaims. "But can I get in?"
Pelle sighs, not weary but tired. His chest seems to collapse with it. "I guess. Why?"
Øystein shuts the door behind him, locks it. "Cold," he lies.
Pelle moves back to the wall, hesitates when Øystein lays down and pushes his face into his neck. "You feel warm," he says, as if suspicious, but lets him curl into him.
His leg is still damp with sweat and the skin clings to Pelle's as he moves it between his thin calves. "Just go back to sleep," he mumbles.
An arm is slung over his shoulders, and Pelle does. He smells like winter pines and dirt. He must have gone outside when Øystein retreated to the basement to practice guitar. When he tries to remember what they fought about, he draws a blank, and puts the question to rest in the collar of his shirt.
"Pelle?"
"Fuck's sake," he groans. "I want to sleep."
"I know," Øystein says, a pseudo-apology. "I love you. That's all."
He pauses, says the words carefully: "I love you, too." Pelle moves to lay more atop of him at an awkward angle, and when he begins to snore again, face buried in his splayed black hair and arm trapped underneath the both of them, Øystein knows he means it.