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“Elias,” he mumbles against the skin of his neckline. It feels good to say, like making sure the body pressed to his really exists, vibrates back against the outline of his, is not just another formless shadow of the things he used to care about.
Elias really is back. He’s been back for a long time now: MSI marks the middle of the year they’ve been together and therefore marks the halfway point of the remaining days they’ve got to spend.
It’s not a sad thought, they are here right now, and days don’t go by in half-years. Last time Marek checked, it was something like sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours a day, light-seconds away from collapse but never quite reaching past the rim of its event horizon.
One day. One day in the faraway land of Vancouver, untethered from all of Berlin and their easy, automated lives; it takes one day or twenty four hours or 1440 minutes away from it all for the weight of Elias’ being to dawn on his soul.
Peace, he’d called it, before he knew where it came from.
Elias smells of fresh shower, his plain black tee suffering from the way he hasn’t bothered to dry himself after, pearls of lukewarm water still rolling down the side of his neck when he knocked on Marek’s door; and now, now too. It hasn’t been that long, or, Marek isn’t sure.
Time isn’t something that matters when Elias wants to stay near him like this.
He can tell Elias used a different soap than back in Berlin, this one less floral, more sharp, like bath salts, jolting Marek awake to the question, or rather, the answer: he knows it by heart, how it’s like to hold Elias. Or to be held by.
The scent, the pressure, the point of no return past which matter is too dense to escape, Marek now just aware that he must have somehow crossed it.
There’s no point in knowing now, much as there is no point in putting a fall danger sign at the tail end of the cliff, much as there is no point in thinking, why are you here, Elias?
The question only exists for a moment in their bubble of space, before wandering somewhere distant— lighter than the first attempt at a quark and somehow winning the race against light, it escapes.
Why are you he—
It’s like it was never there. Like it’s been swallowed up by the way Elias’ breath is soft on his shoulder and his stilt arms feel weightless around him, the way nothing ever falls into place except like this.
Why— Because that’s where you are. Because it’s right.
Marek wonders if gravity is different on the other side of the world or if he still hasn’t gotten used to the jetlag, the ever-dragging weight of everything suddenly turned into tasteless mush, brightless lights like a hospital’s, except plastered on every corner and anything that dares utter some shine.
Marek remembers Seoul, the worst of them all, three days or seventy-two hours or 4.320 minutes of feeling like the world was trying to swallow him whole from the legs up; then Shanghai and Chengdu, which had been more kind on his senses— all of the places that Elias has never been to.
And then Mexico City, warm like the bowels of the world to the point of nausea and unequivocally devoid of Elias when they’d first dragged their suitcases across the simmering asphalt of the New World, on the other side of a Sea of salt and water that Marek had only ever looked at through the oval, glass window of a passenger plane.
At some point during their agonizingly warm death and subsequent rebirth, there had been Elias, and no world— old or new— had bowed to greet him. He wasn’t there and then one day he was.
But if the warp in space-time ever affected him the same way it always did Marek, he'd never let it show, not even for the good old sport of complaining; and Marek had always assumed Elias was made for it: lapse, incoherence.
But now that he has him close enough that their cosmically near-null weights pull each other, he gets another impression.
There’s bags under his eyes a darker shade than usual, he’s holding Marek past the point where he usually lets go, not saying anything past the point where, without fail, a joke always crosses his lips.
He’s just there, in his arms, smelling like hotel body wash and stage fright, the tips of his hair almost down to his shoulder with the weight of that foreign Canadian water; a silence that doesn’t give Marek a graceful enough space to laugh at his jokes, only to feel him.
In short, Elias is fucking exhausted.
It’s one of those moments, infinitely long moments where it’s just Elias and him, where there’s nothing between them but the dull thrum that makes up the world without pretence— Elias is made of solid, warm matter, and he is in his arms, in this hotel room on the other side of the planet but on the same side of the event horizon of closeness.
Elias is real, and Marek wants to kiss him so badly it hurts.
Maybe not right now, but also, not at any moment in time other than right now.
If not, when?
Might be that the passage of time is a lie made up by the vilest of cowards.
Marek is, perhaps. But the world is lagging behind, moving at lightspeed while only they stay, the extense that they’ve been here together is but a minute tallied onto the bodies of all other sentient matter, and he’s been waiting for another time forever since a minute ago.
“Elias,” he says again, this time it’s a question for Elias with a hand on his cheek and a clear view of his sky-overcast eyes, the way they’re jumping from Marek's lips to then try and meet his gaze, and then again, the way he doesn’t have to ask why because it’s not really a question.
Why is anyone ever anywhere, anyway?
Right, no one is ever somewhere for a reason other than the one for which they are, which is to be there.
And for one, Marek thinks that the reason he’s here, right now, in all the glory of stranger walls rendered in jetlag and an evening that feels like the earliest sunrise on Earth is so that he can kiss Elias.
Elias agrees. So Marek does. First Elias’ cheek and then his lips, softly, this isn’t their world, it’s never been. There hasn't ever been something to lose, not right at the core of this singularity where everything but gravity is already gone.
Then there’s Elias’ arms around his neck, even though he reaches just fine, Marek’s own arms finding his waist, and then their bodies finding the grey metal door and the sound of the keycard dropping to the carpet, neither of them hears, there’s no sound in space and there’s no air between them, no room for breath in the mere angstrom that makes up their distance.
And then when their mouths are apart, there’s Elias’ fogged up glasses, condensation through which Marek still makes out the gravitational pull of his gaze, how he's looking at (and through) him right now the same way he does always, when he thinks Marek isn't looking and when he knows he is.
Like he wants, wants something from him, maybe just to kiss him again.
So Marek does.