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Pete wakes up to a warning. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he must have, because the last several hours are missing and his head feels fuzzy. It’s nighttime, and freezing. The other boys are all indistinct shapes in the dark. Their footfalls are loud in his ears. Ray is—
“Pete?” A familiar hand on his back. “Are you asleep?”
Ray is right here, of course. There’s nowhere else to go.
“I was,” Pete says. “I’m awake now.”
Sort of, at least. His brain feels full of static. He notes absently that his shoes are gone. The ground is cold and wet through his socks. That’s Maine weather for you. If Pete’s still here when the sun comes up it will dry and his feet will burn against the asphalt, and his blisters will rub away and he’ll leave little bits of skin to fry on the road, souvenirs for the locals.
“Pete?”
Ray sounds like he’s said Pete’s name more than once. He leans into Pete’s line of vision. He looks worried. Pete hates that. “Hey. Are you okay?”
Pete thinks about it. “I don’t know,” he admits. Everything is so far away.
He’s afraid, though. Always. That’s the worst part of sleeping on the Walk, that you wake up and have to remember where you are.
At least Ray is here. For now.
“Talk to me,” Ray says. His voice is strange, gentle. “How long have we been Walking?”
“I don’t know,” Pete says again. The days and nights all blur together. “A long time.”
“How far have we gone?”
“I don’t know.” God, he’s useless. “I’m sorry. I fell asleep.”
“It’s okay.” Ray’s rubbing a hand up and down Pete’s side now, reassuring, like trying to calm a skittish horse. Pete tries to feel it but it’s like he’s covered in insulation; the whole world is muffled.
“Think about something else,” Ray suggests, still in that strange voice. “Tell me, uh, tell me five things you can see.”
“You,” Pete says. It’s hard to form words. “The road. The other boys. The moon. The half track. Do you—”
“We’re going fast enough. It’s okay.”
Pete shakes his head, disoriented. “No, no, I mean do you—”
“I don’t have any warnings,” Ray promises.
“Okay. Okay, good.” Usually he keeps track of Ray’s warnings alongside his own, but he’s so out of it right now. Maybe this is how dying starts. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.” Ray’s still petting his side. “Take a deep breath.”
Pete tries. It comes out whistling and pathetic. He’s pathetic.
“Sorry,” he says again.
“Quit apologizing,” Ray says mildly. “Four things you can feel?”
“You. The wind.” Pete closes his eyes. “The road. You.”
“You already said me.”
“My clothes, then,” Pete amends, though if he had his way Ray would be the only thing there was to feel, Ray’s warmth and Ray’s heartbeat and Ray’s breath in his ear, their footsteps on the pavement. He’d be the only thing to hear or see or smell. The Walk would vanish and the fear would melt away and all that would be left would be Ray’s arm around him, Ray’s tired worried eyes.
Sometimes Pete thinks he never loved anybody before he met Ray at the starting line.
They go through the other three senses. Pete hears the hum of the half-track’s engine, his own footsteps, his breathing. He smells wet night air and Ray.
He tastes blood.
“Did you bite your lip?” Ray asks, peering at his face.
Pete shakes his head. “It’s everywhere.”
Ray looks very sad. He holds Pete tighter and doesn’t say anything.
They Walk like that for a while, arms around each other. Ray smells like fear and sweat and rain and soap. Someone buys his ticket behind them and Pete tastes a little more blood, thinks, not my turn yet.
It’s coming, though, isn’t it? His turn. It hangs over him, dogs at his heels, hovers just out of sight on the road ahead. He can feel death in his feet and brain stem and chest. The fear is overwhelming. They’re going to kill him. They’re going to kill him and he can’t stop it. All he can do is make it worth it, die for something.
Pete will wait until it’s just him and Ray, and then he’ll sit down. That’s the plan. That’s been the plan since mile seven, when Curley was crying and screaming and Ray put big hands on his shoulders and tried to keep him Walking, a kid he barely knew.
Dying for Ray will be the best damn thing Pete’s ever done. He knows that.
But—
He’s afraid.
Will it hurt? He thinks it has to, probably, but there had been a few numb moments after the hunting knife where nothing had hurt at all. And then it had all come flooding in, like lava. But it can’t flood in if he’s dead, right? So maybe he can die numb, before his body realizes what’s happened, and it won’t have to hurt. Maybe. He just doesn’t know.
Or, no, it’s the Major who does the final kill, right? So they’ll shoot him in the gut first, and then there will be awful infinite seconds to feel it all before it’s over. And he’ll hear Ray screaming, because of course Ray will scream, of course, and Pete will watch the Major’s barrel come level with his head and—
“Pete?” Ray says. They must have walked at least a mile in this silence but the road’s barely changed. “You’re shaking.”
Pete tries to stop; can’t. “I’m afraid,” he admits.
“What are you afraid of?” Ray asks.
“Stopping,” Pete says. “And keeping going.” There’s a lump in his throat and he has to swallow it down. “I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Ray tells him.
Pete shakes his head uselessly. Ray doesn’t understand. Ray doesn’t know that he’s already dead, and Pete doesn’t have the words. He doesn’t have anything in him except fear and static and exhaustion and missing home.
He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Ray’s hands come up to hold his face.
“Oh, honey,” Ray says. He looks so sad.
Pete says, high and strangled: “Ray—”
“Shh.” Ray swipes the tears away with his thumbs. “It’s okay. It’s all gonna be okay.” He puts an arm around Pete’s waist again and squeezes, tight, to keep him from jittering apart; puts his other hand on Pete’s sternum, over his rabbiting heart. “It’ll be over soon,” he promises.
“No,” Pete says desperately. He can’t breathe. He wants to go home. He wants to go home. He wants to be home with Ray, somewhere warm and dry where they can sit face-to-face at zero miles per hour. He wants to be fully awake when he dies instead of in whatever daze he’s in now. “No, I don’t want to—”
But if he doesn’t then Ray will—
“Pete.”
—and Pete will have to watch it, Jesus, or hear it at least, Ray getting his face blown off, and Pete will win covered in his blood and Ray will lay there like roadkill and the vultures will circle him and tear out his beautiful eyes—
“Pete?”
—and Ginnie-like-in-the-martinis will never see her son again or sing to him or hold him and it will be Pete’s fault, all Pete’s fault for being too scared to lose, but god he doesn’t want to he’s so scared he doesn’t want to die—
“Pete!” Ray shakes him, presses their temples together. “Hey, Pete, listen! Can I tell you about a dream I had?”
Pete is distantly aware that he’s hyperventilating. He feels like there’s a wild animal in his chest in place of lungs. And he’s dying and he doesn’t care about a fucking dream, either, but Ray is looking at him like it’s important and it’s Ray. He manages a jerky nod.
“Okay. Okay. I dreamed that we both won the Walk, like in your wish, remember? And—we got to sit down, and we split the money, and they took us to the hospital.” Ray talks very fast, like he needs to get everything out before Pete keels over. “And my feet were real fucked up and yours weren’t great either, but it was fine, ‘cause we were alive. We were alive. You got that?”
“Yeah,” Pete chokes out.
“After we got out of the hospital we went home and slept a lot. You stayed with me in my room. Every time I woke up you had your arm around me.” Ray squeezes him a little tighter. “Just like we are now, that’s how we slept. You tried to leave and I said I’d tie you to my bed and my mom said don’t even think about it. So you stayed.”
Pete’s breath catches on a sob. He’s too tired to lift his arms to wipe his face. Ray has to do it for him.
“We split the money,” Ray continues. “And we—you bought a guitar, and you cooked with my mom, and she taught you that song I was telling you about. And you sang it to me. And I knit you a hat and you hated it and you wore it anyway. I have pictures.”
It occurs to Pete that when Ray wins, he won’t have any pictures to remember Pete by. There are barely any pictures of Pete at all in the world. Barkovitch is dead but maybe his camera…? If Ray can recover it, if he thinks to. If the final shot didn’t shatter it and expose the film.
Ray is still talking. “—and we bought a house together in Portland.”
“Wait,” Pete mumbles. “Portland in Maine?” He shakes his head ineffectively in an attempt to clear the static. “I—hate Maine.”
“You hated it in the dream, too,” Ray assures him. “You complained a lot. But I wanted to be close to my mom. And you said you would go wherever I went.”
Which is true. Pete would. Pete has.
“What color?” he gets out. “The house.”
“Blue,” says Ray. “Sky blue with white shutters. And window boxes with flowers. It’s…what’s the word? Picturesque. Like something from a catalog.”
It’s difficult for Pete to imagine himself in a house like that, but it’s easy to picture Ray there. That’s exactly where Ray should be. Pete nods approvingly.
“Inside is cozy,” Ray continues. His eyes are wet now. “Not too big. Except the kitchen, that’s big. We have all these shelves in the living room for my books, and my dad’s. We swapped the covers on the illicit ones, though. We had a whole fight about that part. And there’s a window seat for me to read in, and a fireplace.”
Pete has always wanted a fireplace. He wonders how dream-Ray knew that, or if maybe Ray’s always wanted one too. He wonders how long there have been streetlights and houses on either side of the road.
“And no stairs. Or rugs. We had a fight about that too, ‘cause my feet and all, and you kept saying they’re a tripping hazard, but I kept saying you’d be cold in winter…anyway. You won. No rugs. I knit you socks.”
“What color?”
“Every color. So you could match them to your shirts.”
Pete’s breathing is coming easier now, shallow gasps but not so frequent. Ray’s hand is warm on his chest, arm secure around his torso.
“We got a whole life,” Ray says. “A good one. Not perfect, but—I don’t know. Waking up together. You helped kids like you, and decided to grow tomato plants…and making dinner together. And visiting my mom. And a shitty car you fixed up, and a grocery list on the fridge, and—” He blinks tears away but they just fall down his face. “A house. Jobs. Fucking life, Pete.”
Life. Together.
Pete wants it so bad that it hurts.
“It sounds nice,” he manages to say.
“It is nice,” Ray says. Nonsensical, but then they’re both so tired. “So—keep Walking, okay? It’ll be over soon.”
“Okay,” Pete whispers.
He doesn’t get what an impossible dream has to do with anything, but it’s Ray. And his head is so far away and fuzzy-afraid. And it’s Ray—Ray, whose arms are still firm around him even though it’s making his steps weird and stilted. Pete’s Walked so far for him. He can go a little farther.
So they Walk. Pete drifts, loses time. He blinks and suddenly the sky is different and he’s a mile down the road. He keeps seeing houses he swears they've already passed. His feet hurt, and he still doesn’t remember what happened to his shoes or backpack. Probably Ray would remind him, if he asked, but it’s not like it really matters anyway. Nothing matters except the road and them on it and Ray next to him, steady, like an angel.
God, Pete wants him to go home.
After a long time or maybe no time at all there’s the first grey light of early dawn on the eastern horizon, another night almost done. Pete wonders how many that makes. Wonders if he’ll see another one. The footsteps of the other Walkers have gotten more distant, and one of the half-tracks must have peeled off too, engines quieter. There can’t be that many boys left.
It’ll be over soon.
“You should get some sleep,” Ray says. His voice is rough—neither of them have spoken in over an hour, maybe more. “I’ll keep pace.”
“But—you’ll get tired.”
“Don’t even start.” Ray pokes him gently in the side. “You barely slept, all those nights—let me do this.”
Pete worries his lip between his teeth. He knows it’s pathetic, he knows, but—
“What if I wake up and you’re not there?”
“I’ll be there.” Ray lets go of Pete’s waist with one hand but only so he can hold his face again, knock their foreheads together. “I promise, Pete: When you wake up it will be morning, and I’ll be there. It will be alright.”
He can’t promise that at all. But it’s Ray. Pete looks in his bright eyes and believes him anyway. “Okay.”
Ray pulls Pete’s arm to be slung around his neck, gently guides his head down to rest on his shoulder. He scratches Pete’s scalp absentmindedly before letting go and Pete has the sudden urge to start crying again.
“Hey, Ray?”
“Yeah, Pete?”
Pete has to force it out around the lump in his throat. “Thanks.”
“Anytime,” Ray says easily. He’s so goddamn good. Pete wants to tell him that he was wrong about his dad being the last, that he makes it so easy to look for the light. He wants to tell Ray he’s sorry. He wants to tell Ray that he loves him.
“I got you,” Ray whispers. “Go to sleep.”
Pete does.
+ + + + +
Ray can never sleep after nights like these, even once he’s Walked Pete back to their house and carefully gotten him back into bed. He gets under the covers and lays face to face with him, close enough to feel him breathing. Tangles their fingers. But he can’t close his eyes, has to keep the bedside lamp on. What if Pete goes Walking again and Ray doesn’t wake up? It’s never actually happened—Ray always starts awake before Pete’s even left the house, body unused to his absence in the bed, love acting like ESP—but what if?
The first time this happened, only a few weeks after everything, Ray tried to stop him with hands on his shoulders, to wake him up. But it didn’t work because Pete wasn’t really asleep, he’d just gone back in time and was stuck there. So instead of waking up he got scared, started babbling about warnings, begging Ray to get out of the way and don’t slow down, gonna get a ticket, please, no, they’re gonna, you gotta—and they’d spent hours in a heap on the floor by the front door, Pete catatonic and thinking they were both dead while Ray tried uselessly to convince him they weren’t.
So now they Walk. Pete stumbles along on autopilot and Ray guides him up and down their quiet street, miles on end. The shortest it’s ever lasted was seven minutes, back in October, before Pete stepped through the surface of a frozen puddle and shocked himself awake; the longest was five hours in January, which is not an experience Ray is eager to repeat.
Tonight wasn’t bad, all things considered. Two hours at most. And it’s May, so it’s a little cool out, but hardly cold. Although, Ray reflects, Pete was probably freezing anyway. A year living here hasn’t made him any less of a baby about Maine weather. Poor thing spent most of October through March piled under quilts in front of their fireplace, and even now that it’s spring he sleeps in long sleeves and socks.
The socks he was wearing tonight are probably ruined. Which is fine. Ray can just knit him a new pair. He’ll knit a new pair every morning if that’s what Pete needs.
There’s light on the horizon when Pete wakes up, a little gasping noise and his whole body jerking, eyes darting around the room. He blinks rapidly for several seconds, remembering, then turns his face into the pillow.
“It happened again,” he says, muffled.
“Yeah,” Ray confirms.
“How long?”
“Two hours, maybe. Not that long.”
“Shit. What time?”
“Mm…like three? I didn’t check.”
“Shit,” Pete says again with more feeling. Ray reaches out, soothes a hand over his ribs.
There’s a bird singing outside the window. The windchimes tinkle on the house next door. Ray doesn’t think any of their neighbors saw them Walking last night; they’re mostly elderly and should have all been asleep, but even if they did see they won’t say anything. They’ll just be a little friendlier next time they pass Pete outside with the tomatoes. It’s that kind of neighborhood. That kind of world, Pete would say. It’s one of the best things Pete’s given Ray other than everything: the eyes to see that most people are good.
Pete lifts his head from the pillow. “How are your feet?”
Fucking awful, like there’s knives in his shins. “I took my meds.”
“And—”
“And did the lidocaine spray. I’ll be okay, Pete. I probably just won’t get out of bed today.” And maybe tomorrow.
“I’m sorry,” Pete says miserably.
He sounds so ashamed. Ray holds his hand tighter. “Nothing to be sorry for.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
Pete’s staring at the ceiling with that focused look he gets when he’s trying not to cry, eyes bright in the lamplight. “I just don’t know why this keeps happening.”
“It’s just your brain being fucked up. Same as mine is.”
Ray can’t take showers anymore without being sent back to that last rainy night, and a truck backfiring makes him shake. He feels ill whenever he sees porn mags or jelly sandwiches or notebooks or smells SPAM. One of the kids had a nosebleed back in February and Ray was so beside himself that Pete had to basically carry him out of the room.
Pete’s always taking care of him. Has been since the starting line. So even though it hurts to see Pete back there on the road, Ray will never be anything but grateful for the chance to give a little care back. He doesn’t care about the nerves in his feet, or what their neighbors think, or about being tired. He just wants Pete to be okay, and not alone.
“I love you,” he tells Pete, because he never gets tired of saying so, and he figures Pete can use the reminder right about now. “I’ll never leave you alone. Especially not on the Walk.”
“I love you too,” Pete says. He fiddles with their tangled fingers, restless. “But—”
“But what?” Pete’s so smart and kind until it comes to himself, and then he has all these dumb fucking ideas in his head. Probably it will take their whole lives for Ray to get it all out, to convince Pete he’s worth it. Which is just fine.
“What if it never stops?” Pete asks. “What if I keep doing this shit forever?”
“Then that’s how long I’ll Walk.”
Pete is silent for a while. Then he rolls over with a sigh, puts his arms around Ray, the way they were for so many miles. Says: “Alright.”
“Alright,” Ray says back, hiding a smile in Pete's hair. They lie there together as the sunrise comes in through the window.