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He’d been awake for almost thirty-six hours.
The airport was starting to feel too much like a living thing.
Humming, buzzing, breathing stale air through vents that never stopped sighing. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered just enough to be noticeable if you stopped to glare at them, and IV couldn’t stop doing just that. His eyes burned from how blue they were.
Every sound pressed against his skull—the shuffle of luggage wheels, the digital ping of gate announcements, the murmur of a thousand tired people trying to pass time before boarding. Even the hum of the floor under his sneakers from the jet engines felt like it vibrated too close to his bones. The watery coffee, half an energy drink, and overpriced pastry sloshing around in his stomach probably didn’t help things either.
His hands wouldn’t stay still—he kept rolling his knuckles back and forth, tightening his fist until the bands of his rings bit into the skin. One was missing, thrown into the crowd on a whim of gratitude after their last show, but still the pressure was grounding. Familiar. It was the only thing that felt like his.
Across from him, III was pacing between the chairs, headphones around his neck leaking a tinny bassline. He couldn’t stop moving—drumming his fingers against his thigh, bouncing between his heels and his toes, talking through half a dozen thoughts at once. Something about their set the night before. Something about the guy at the security checkpoint who was wearing their earrings. Something about how every airport smells like if chicken nuggets were made of ground up linoleum. He laughed at his own joke, the sound loud enough to turn a few heads nearby.
IV tried to smile, but it came out wrong. His ears rang. His pulse fluttered in his throat. Every word III said hit his brain just slightly off-time, like being caught in a rhythm he couldn’t step out of. He shut his eyes and tried to breathe. The music, the voices, the light, the smell—it all kept getting louder.
III was still talking. “—and I swear, man, if the flight’s delayed again, I’m just gonna live here. Me and the gate chairs. Besties forever. Maybe I’ll claim a couple and start charging rent—”
“Can you just—” IV snapped, voice too sharp even to his own ears. He opened his eyes from where he hadn’t realized he’d squeezed them shut, the words already halfway out and impossible to pull back. “Can you just sit down and shut the fuck up for five minutes? Christ, you look fucking stupid.”
The words seemed to shatter against the tile.
For a heartbeat, everything in the terminal froze—the rolling of luggage wheels, the scratch of shoes, the hum of conversation. Even the speakers overhead seemed to falter mid-announcement, words dropping into a hollow pause. It was as if the world itself had leaned in to listen.
III stood completely still, blinking at him. The usual spark that lived in his face—bright, animated, always moving—snuffed out in an instant. His mouth hung open slightly like he’d been mid-breath when IV’s words hit him, but nothing came out. His shoulders twitched once, restless energy looking for somewhere to go, and then went still.
He didn’t get angry. Didn’t defend himself or roll his eyes or shoot something sarcastic back the way IV expected him to.
He just… looked at him.
Looked like someone who’d been handed a blow they couldn’t quite process, eyes wide and glimmering faintly under the harsh fluorescent light.
All that restless movement, the bouncing, the pacing—gone.
The silence lasted too long. It pressed on, into, IV’s skin, thick and metallic. His pulse pounded in his ears, and for a moment he almost wanted to take it back, to say something stupid and half-hearted just to fill the air again, to pretend it didn’t happen. But his jaw was locked, and guilt was already crawling up his throat, too sharp to swallow.
III swallowed for him instead. His Adam’s apple bobbed. Then he smiled, nodded—small, tight, almost imperceptible, more to himself than to IV—and said, quietly, “Sorry, mate.”
He turned, quick and deliberate, the cord of his headphones bouncing against his chest as he walked away. His boots scuffed across the tile in short, uneven strides that sounded like someone trying not to run.
Vessel stood up from his seat down the row, the outburst having caught his attention. He lingered just long enough for IV to look up and see the worry in his eyes. Then he followed, no words, just a look.
And then they were gone, swallowed by the shifting bodies and chatter of the terminal.
The world started moving again, fast-forwarding to catch up to where it had paused from, but IV stayed where he was.
II didn’t say anything. He was still sitting a few chairs over, legs stretched out straight, arms folded loosely across his stomach. He didn’t even look at IV right away, just watched the slow crawl of planes through the glass, their wings cutting white against the blue. The bubble of quiet he commanded around him was steady, but not all the way comfortable—it was deliberate. Heavy. A quiet that made IV hyperaware of the space he took up.
The guilt came in waves. His hands wouldn’t stop fidgeting. His rings clicked against each other in nervous rhythm, and every sound seemed too loud again—the chatter, the footsteps, the distant whine of an espresso machine. It all felt somehow louder than before. His heart felt like it was vibrating instead of beating.
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, rubbing both hands roughly over his face, pulling them through his hair this way and that, reaching under his seat to grab the stress ball from his carry-on and wring it between his hands. His voice came out raw, cracked with anxiety and frustration.
That got II’s attention. He finally turned his head, studying him with that unreadable, half-lidded look of his—part judgment, part patience. “You want to get some fresh air?” he asked. His tone wasn’t cold, just firm, like a teacher assessing a tantrum.
IV exhaled shakily, shook his head once, not trusting his voice to keep going.
II just hummed, looked at him a minute longer before turning back toward the window.
The conversation was over, but the quiet stayed. They sat there for a long while—long enough for IV’s heart rate to stop thrumming against his ribs, long enough for the world to start feeling real again.
The hum of the airport folded back in, the constant motion of strangers moving on with their mornings, and IV just sat there, shoulders tense, trying to gather what was left of himself out of the wreckage.
He lasted ten minutes before his chest started to ache from sitting still.
The air in the terminal felt thick, recycled one time too many. His throat was dry and sticky at the same time. His clothes were too tight and layered badly and the wrong fabric. His hair and face itched from not being washed recently enough, and with plastic-y hotel products the last time it had been. People were laughing somewhere behind him—too loud, too sudden—and it broke the fragile quiet he’d managed to find. He flinched before he could stop himself, pressing the stress ball to his lips and biting down on the rubber of it, hard, until his jaw ached and the material threatened to give.
II hadn’t moved. He hadn’t spoken again either, just tapped his boot against the floor every few seconds, steady as a heartbeat. A metronome for him to lock onto. A quiet anchor, somehow—close enough to feel like company, far enough to not demand anything.
Still, the weight of his own body felt wrong. Too big. Too visible. An apology kept choking him even though II hadn’t asked for one.
“I’m gonna—,” IV muttered finally, waving his hand towards a vague wall. His voice sounded small even to himself.
II gave a slow nod, eyes still trained on the window. “I’ll be here. Take your time,” he said, not unkindly.
IV didn’t answer. He just stood—slowly, carefully—and slipped away into the crowd.
He found an empty stretch of wall at the corner of the gate, half-hidden between a vending machine and a row of potted plants that already looked fake even before the odor of hot plastic and old dust became apparent. He slid down until he was sitting on the thin carpet, back against the wall, legs pulled up tight. The noise was still there—air vents, footsteps, snippets of conversation—but distant enough here that he could pretend it was just static.
He pressed his hands flat against the floor, feeling the burn of the coarse weave on the pads of his fingers, the grit of debris working its way under his nails, the faint vibration of footsteps through his palms. The sensations, awful as they were, steadied him in their own strange way. Real. Physical. Something he could measure.
He tried to breathe the way his therapist used to tell him—counting slow, in and out, matching it to the rhythm of the terminal. He wasn’t sure it helped, but it gave him something to do, to focus on.
People passed by. No one looked twice. Good. He didn’t want them to.
Let him be just another poor shmuck camping his way though a layover.
Let him be not IV for a while.
By the time he noticed footsteps not walk past him but stop a few feet away, he already knew who it was—he could tell by the weight of the silence that followed. Vessel always moved softly, like he was afraid of startling the air around him. III distinctly less so, but that same motion of planting his heels before rolling to his toes from earlier had already given him away.
IV looked up, and there they were. Vessel first, standing silent and calm, eyes soft behind his glasses. III a step behind him, jittery and small in a way IV had never seen before. The cord of his headphones was gone even though they remained at his neck, wound tight around one hand instead.
Vessel met IV’s eyes, then flicked a glance toward the open space beside him. IV gave a small nod—acceptance, or reassurance, or thanks, he wasn’t sure—and Vessel looked up to III one last time before taking his leave to go collapse next to II.
III stayed standing for a long moment, rocking from side to side as he looked anywhere but at IV. The air between them felt electric, not angry—just… fragile.
He looked awful. Eyes red at the corners, face splotchy and pink, lips chewed raw. Exhausted and overstimulated and guilty all at once.
IV didn’t imagine he looked much better.
They stared towards each other for a full minute that felt like longer. No one spoke.
Finally, IV tilted his head toward the open space beside him, the smallest possible gesture. He didn’t have the words, and maybe that was for the best. III dropped down immediately, shoulders curling in as he sat close—closer than he should’ve, maybe, but not close enough to do more than brush against IV on the odd motion. His leg bounced, then stopped, tense. He took a deep breath that trembled a little at the end.
For a long moment, that was all. The two of them sat there, noise churning around the both of them like static—too big, too bright, too much—and then slowly fading as their little pocket of stillness began to hold its own shape.
III shifted again, just enough that his knee pushed more firmly against IV’s. It wasn’t quite an accident, but it wasn’t deliberate either. The contact was fleeting, light, a question more than a statement.
Then came humming, different from the rest.
Not a tune, not really. Just a low, steady vibration from the back of III’s throat—barely audible over the buzz of the background. Just another tone to blend the others outwards, a body remembering what to do when silence hurt as much as noise. The sound wove through the space between them, grounding and oddly gentle.
He rocked slightly as he hummed, side to side, the movement small and repetitive. Something instinctive, self-soothing, looping over and over in time with his breath.
The stimulation should have made things worse. Should have aggravated IV’s already shot senses even further and sent him spiraling yet again. More touch and more sound should have been the last things he wanted. And yet, they helped, somehow, when they were from III.
The brush of their knees came again, a little more intentional this time, followed by the faint creak of fabric as he leaned fractionally closer. The air between them changed—softer now, in a way IV hadn’t realized he’d been desperately missing.
IV didn’t let himself think about it. He just leaned into it. Not much—just enough to rest against the wall, blessedly cool against his arm, for balance as the heat of III’s weight pressed him against it in slow waves.
The hum settled somewhere inside his ribs, curling heavy against his own lungs. The combined rocking of their bodies and gentle compression a massage to his nerves. His heartbeat matched to it, slow and deliberate.
He let his eyes close.
Time loosened its grip after that. Minutes stretched into something formless and kind. The airport moved around them in a blur of sound—shapes of suitcases and people alike in steady motion, a distant voice announcing vague words, the faint thrum of unknown machines in the next area. But here, in this corner, there was nothing to do but breathe.
III’s voice dipped lower, the hum fading into something like a sigh. His head tipped back against the wall.
After a while, he mumbled, almost sleepily, “You’re alright, mate.” The words were quiet but not tentative. They landed with the same rhythm as the hum before it.
IV’s throat tightened. He swallowed around the lump there, then nodded once, voice barely more than breath. “You are too.”
They didn’t talk more after that.
The hum picked up again—faint now, softer, more vibration than sound—and IV finally let the airport dissolve into nothing.