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It's the middle of the night when he's shaken awake.
"Yo," a voice rasps, and Nam-gyu is scrambling up before they can continue, kicking out with his leg. He connects with something with a sick crunch, hears a thud as the person buckles to the floor, groaning. He's above them before they can try to get up again, bloodied fork gripped tight in his hand, and the room spins unsteadily about him. He's sober, now, more or less, with a splitting headache and nausea creeping up at the back of his throat - he'd taken far too many pills last night, one after another after another, and now his mouth tastes acrid and bitter. He'll still put up a fight, though. He's won fights with worse odds before.
The person on the floor doesn't look like a threat, he'll admit that much. They're sort of crumpled in on themselves, grabbing at their face with their hands. All he can really make out of them in the gloom is their hair, short and tousled and - purple -
"No," Nam-gyu whispers, "no, no, what the fuck."
Yeah, he thinks, yeah, he's not sober. He can't be. Purple hair, and chipped nail polish, and he has to be seeing things. Because it's Thanos, staring up at him through trembling fingers, moving and living and staring up at him with this giant, bloodied wound at the front of his neck.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Thanos says, grimacing in what Nam-gyu thinks is meant to be a grin. There's blood pouring from his nose, staining his teeth - so that's what Nam-gyu had connected with - and his voice sounds fucked, like he's choking on liquid with every word.
"What the fuck," Nam-gyu manages, eyes trained on the blood dripping from Thanos' chin, and a wave of nausea hits him. He turns just enough to not throw up on Thanos, because he's real nice like that, and starts vomiting. Retches up bile next to the reanimated corpse of Thanos the fucking great, and that just makes him chuckle, laughing and retching in semi-equal amounts until he's gasping for air.
"Nam-su, that's fucking disgusting," he can hear from his left, and that just sets him off again. Because he knows that voice. Can't convince himself that he's hallucinating, that he's giving Thanos' face to Min-su or MG fucking Coin or even a guard while he's half-asleep. He knows that voice. Thinks he could pick it out of a crowd of thousands.
He sits down on the edge of the bed, shakily. Stares at Thanos, whose lip is curled in distain. "Is this a dream?"
Thanos begins to laugh, but it quickly devolves into a cough, wet and painful-sounding. Nam-gyu watches him clutch onto the bed frame with one hand, wipe his mouth with the other. "You dream about me? That's kind of gay, boy." He glances at his hand, grimacing when he sees the blood. Wipes it on Nam-gyu's sheets, carefully.
"There's no fucking way you survived that." Nam-gyu reaches for his arm, still resting on the bed, and touches it. He half-imagines his fingers will fall straight through. But Thanos is solid - cold to the touch, clammy with sweat, but alive. "Jesus," Nam-gyu breathes, and Thanos clicks his teeth, pulls his arm away.
"You gonna help me up?" He breathes in, sharply - tries to pull himself up to his knees, and collapses straight back to the floor. "Help me up, Nam-su."
It would be so easy, really. Thanos is pathetic, shaking, still can't remember his fucking name, and it would take less than a minute to dig that fork back into his neck and go back to sleep and be done with this whole thing, once and for all. Wouldn't even have to do that much, if he didn't want to. Could just climb the ladder up to the highest bed and wait until someone else finished Thanos off for him while he lays there on the floor. It would be so goddamn easy. He looks at Thanos, again, staring up at him with those dark eyes, and wants to scream.
"Fuck," he whispers, instead. Detangles himself from his shitty, thin bedsheets, swings his legs out of bed. Grabs Thanos under his armpits and more or less drags him onto the bed, as close to the edge as he can leave him without him actually being on the floor. Has to fucking scramble over him to get back into bed, pulls the blanket over them both. Thanos doesn't even thank him - doesn't say anything, just lays there, shaking, eyes screwed closed. Face a sort of greyish white, dark bruises covering his face and neck. The wound on his neck looks angry, untreated; it's scabbed over, just, but the skin around it looks red and irritated. Blood on his hands. Blood on his nose, his lower jaw, his mouth.
"You done looking?"
Nam-gyu jumps, feels his face heat up. Thanos has cracked open an eye, looks like he's trying to smirk.
"You look like shit," Nam-gyu tells him, irritably. "Thought I'd gotten rid of you."
Thanos smiles. The blood around his mouth cracks, flakes off. "You'll never be rid of Thanos, baby."
/
He's been trying to sleep for the best part of an hour. Laying on his back, eyes closed, making sure no part of his body is within ten centimetres of Thanos. Has been thinking about all the good things he can - the debtors he can pay off with the money he'll win, the rehab clinic he's going to sign up for so that he never ends up in a situation like this again. It's not working, though, because Thanos is shaking so hard that he thinks it must be exaggerated. He can hear his teeth fucking chattering.
"Can you quit it?" he hisses, keeping his eyes closed. Doesn't want to see Thanos' battered body any more, tonight.
The shivering seems to get louder, if anything. "I'm so fucking cold, boy," Thanos hisses back, "Feels like my blood's turned to ice."
Nam-gyu grimaces. "I can't sleep because of you."
"The fuck you want me to do about it?"
Nam-gyu wants to scream, again. Bash his head against the wall. Instead, he starts pulling the sheets off of himself, swings his legs over the side.
"What are you doing?"
"Moving beds." He goes to stand up when Thanos grabs him, icy fingers digging into his arm.
"No, dude, wait -"
"I need to sleep, man -"
"Please -"
"Let go of me -"
"Nam-gyu!"
He sits back down on the bed, heavily. Takes in as deep a breath as he can through the nose that cocaine destroyed more than a few years ago. There's something wrong with himself, he thinks, there has to be something wrong in his head, because he's twenty-eight years old and has done some horrible, fucked-up things in his time and for some reason Thanos calling him by his own name makes him pause.
"Nam-gyu."
"What?"
"I thought I was going to die."
He turns, at that. Tucks his legs back up onto the bed, the way he did as a kid. Stares down at Thanos, who has still got his fingers clasped tightly around Nam-gyu's wrist, who is looking up at him with big, blank eyes. Watches as Thanos takes a deep, shaky breath.
"It hurts so fucking much, man. Hurts when I move. Hurts when I breathe. And I'm so cold, so fucking cold, and I keep thinking - I keep -" He pauses. "I thought I was going to die on that floor, Nam-gyu. I was so fucking scared. I'm still - so fucking scared." His voice breaks, a little, on the last word, and Nam-gyu feels as though a knife is twisting somewhere deep between his ribs. Feels like he's going through the stages of grief, all of them, all of them hitting him at once.
I thought you were dead, he wants to say, I hated you for it. "What do you want?" he says, instead.
Thanos mutters something in English, pulls at him by the wrist.
"Dude, I don't know what that mea-"
"I want you to stay."
The knife twists, again, more painful than the rest of his comedown combined. He should refuse, he thinks, distantly, should get into the next bed and go to sleep and pretend none of this ever happened when he wakes up. Pretend he never heard Thanos ask that in this raw, desperate voice; pretend he never saw how vulnerable his face looks in the dim light of the hall.
Instead, he lets Thanos pull him down. Lets Thanos press his shaking body against him, chest to chest, his face so close he can smell the blood. "I thought I was going to die," he repeats, and Nam-gyu finds himself with his hand in his purple hair.
"It's okay," he whispers, and he doesn't know what he's saying - doesn't do this, doesn't do the whole comforting thing, but he's stroking Thanos' hair and he feels faintly ridiculous but he keeps doing it. Strokes his matted hair with awkward fingers, rubbing his forehead with his thumb. He feels - he feels. Feels like he did when he was fifteen and had his first kiss in an alleyway behind his school. Feels like he's about to jump headfirst over a precipice.
Thanos is watching him, he realises. Is giving him this strange half-smile that Nam-gyu hasn't seen before. "You're in my bed," he says, quietly, and - yeah. There's that.
"Just wanted to sweat over it," Nam-gyu mutters, and he keeps his eyes trained firmly on Thanos' forehead. "Didn't want to get my own sheets dirty."
He hears Thanos laugh, quietly. Turns into a cough, and Nam-gyu just - keeps stroking his head. Even when the coughing stops, Thanos keeps wheezing.
"Did you miss me?" Thanos says, between wheezes. Nam-gyu's gaze has slipped down - he's staring back down at Thanos' face, at the blood pooling at the corner of his mouth. The knife twists again.
"Yeah," he replies, and it feels like it's torn from inside of him. Ripped right out from his throat. He meets Thanos' eyes. "I missed you."
Thanos kisses him, then. Leans in and presses his mouth against his. "Faggot," he mumbles, against his lips, and then kisses him again.
Nam-gyu had thought about this, once. After a shift at the Pentagon where he spent most of the evening bringing Thanos whatever outlandish drink he'd asked for, watching him flirt with model after model. He'd gotten so high he couldn't stop himself, laying on his bed in the dark, thinking about Thanos and his sharp features and his smile. Had brought himself off thinking about his laugh and woke up feeling like shit the next day. He's not into men, not like that, not interested, but he kept watching Thanos night after night until he felt sick.
It's nothing like how he thought it would be. Thanos is holding him so hard it hurts, one hand grabbing at his face, the other clutched against his chest. He's licking into Nam-gyu's mouth with a tongue that tastes like blood, digging his nails into his cheek, moaning from pain or enjoyment or a mixture of the both.
And Nam-gyu can't stop touching, now that he's started. Is running his hands up Thanos' back, over his neck, over his arms. He feels as though he's high, can feel his heart beating so fast he's surprised it hasn't burst out of his chest. He'd stop this, if he were a better man, considering Thanos is grunting every time he has to move his neck, but he just - he wants so much.
Thanos pulls back, just slightly. Holds Nam-gyu's face between his hands, looks about as serious as Nam-gyu's ever seen him.
"Nam-gyu," he says, "I need to know something."
And Nam-gyu is grinning, despite himself. Still has his hand in the back of his hair. "Yeah?"
"Which one of these fuckers stole my necklace?"
/
And this doesn't fix - much. As Thanos lays next to him, snoring, arm slung over his chest, Nam-gyu can't help but - think. There's no chance that Thanos is surviving for long. Even if he can hold himself upright by the next game, even if Nam-gyu physically drags him through it, another player will get him. His neck wound is going to get infected - probably already is.
But - he's alive. For now, he's alive.
It's enough.