Chapter Text
The cabin smelled like frosting before Elliot even opened his eyes, which meant someone had gotten to the kitchen before him for once.
Sure enough, as he flipped onto his side to peer around the rest of the room, it seemed the bunk room where they all slept was empty. Everyone was downstairs, preparing for his…birthday.
He lay there in his bunk a second longer than usual, working out who. Probably Veeronica, given the faint burnt-sugar edge under the sweetness, the kind of smell that meant something had been rescued at the last second instead of done right the first time.
He was not wrong.
Downstairs, Veeronica was scraping a pan clean over the sink while Chance held up two different candle counts and argued aloud with nobody in particular.
Guest 1337 had been recruited to hang a banner, and was currently rather precariously balanced atop a chair that Two Time was not really holding.
Noob was clearly excited, rushing around and making sure everything was in order, as they usually did when it came to cabin parties.
Elliot came down the stairs already smiling. That part was easy. That part he never had to think about, because his body did that for him automatically.
"There he is!" Shedletsky said grandly, "The man of the hour. Or the day. Whichever."
"Both work," Elliot said lightly, tossing a smile to the others who had hands free to wave, and went to go find something useful to do with his own hands, because standing still while people looked at him had never once felt comfortable, birthday or not.
It was, from every angle Elliot could see, a good day. An easy one. Nobody in that room had a single complicated reason to be there.
Builderman clapped a broad hand on his shoulder before he could find something to busy himself with. "Go wash up, birthday boy. We'll be waitin’ in the yard when yer ready."
By the time he was dressed and outside, his head was already hurting with a headache. It wasn’t too bad, in all honesty. Just pressure behind his eyes, the kind that made bright things brighter than they should be.
The yard had been done up properly. A banner strung crooked between two trees, hand-lettered, the marker still a little wet-looking at the edges of the letters. The long table dragged out from the kitchen sat crooked in the grass with it mostly secured into the ground, and Elliot didn’t need to ask to know that it was Guest 1337 who had done the carrying.
There was a cake in the middle of the table with no candles on it, because there was no wax in this realm, and instead they had built a fire pit a little ways off, stacked and ready, waiting for him. Bonfires were a tradition for parties here, since most party-related decorations were non-existent.
The gifts were the strangest part to look at, if you didn't know better. They didn’t have wrapping paper here, so most just did with what they had.
Things wrapped in bandana cloth and tied with twine, one bundled in a spare pillowcase, one just handed over bare because whoever gave it hadn't found anything to cover it with and had stopped caring.
It should have looked sad. But, it didn't, at least to Elliot. It looked like people had gone out of their way twice, once to find something worth giving and once to find something worth wrapping it in.
"S1T, S1T," Veeronica said, already pulling out the chair at the head of the table like she'd been waiting for him specifically to arrive so she could do that.
He sat. Conversation closed back in around him almost immediately, and for a while it was fine, easy even, the kind of noise that didn't ask anything of him. Then Chance and Two Time started arguing about the fire.
"You need at least ten logs for it to last the night," Chance said, counting something invisible on his fingers like the number needed proving.
"You need six," Two Time said. "We've done this every year, dear gambler. It's six."
"It has never been six..."
Elliot lost the rest of it.
Just a soft drop, like a page turning somewhere behind his eyes, and when the sound came back the fire was already lit, already tall enough to throw orange up into the branches overhead, and nobody at the table looked like anything unusual had happened between one sentence and the next.
He glanced at his hands. Still in his lap.
His fingers were curled strangely.
Not tightly. Just…wrong.
He flexed them once.
He didn't remember putting them like that.
He glanced at his plate. A slice of cake on it now, one bite gone.
He didn't remember taking the fork.
Oh well.
His head pulsed once, sharp, and settled back into its dull hum. He didn’t remember when he had the last bite, so it was better to take another just to be safe.
He ate just one more bite so the missing one wouldn't look strange next to it.
There was something oddly familiar about the way the fork sat between his fingers.
He put it down.
He got through the rest of the meal in pieces.
Someone's sentence would start and he'd catch the middle of it instead of the beginning, or he'd hear his own name and have no memory of what question had come before it, so he'd nod, or say yeah, or for real?, and hope his answer landed somewhere close to whatever had actually been asked.
Noob told a story that made everyone laugh and Elliot laughed too, a half second behind the rest of the table, close enough that nobody clocked the delay as anything but a birthday boy a little overwhelmed by all the attention.
Shedletsky stood at one point to say a toast, the way he always did, and Elliot watched his mouth move and heard almost none of it, the words arriving smeared together like a recording played half a step too fast.
By the time his hearing caught back up everyone was raising a cup to him and he raised his back on reflex, half a second behind, smiling through the small private terror of not knowing what he'd just agreed to be toasted for.
It got worse near the fire.
Wishes always did that to him, somehow. Something about closing his eyes on purpose, on command, in front of everyone, made whatever gap wanted to open just open wider.
He shut his eyes to make a wish and the dark behind his eyelids stretched longer than it should have, and for one strange second he had the distinct impression that he was somewhere else entirely.
Not the cabin.
Not the fire.
Somewhere quieter.
Someone else's hands were folded in his lap.
I've got it.
The thought came so naturally that Elliot almost answered it.
Then the fire cracked.
His eyes opened.
The fire had shrunk, logs collapsed inward, and Chance was already saying "okay, everyone, on three," organizing the group into blowing it down together the way they always did instead of candles, and Elliot had no memory of making a wish at all.
He blew when everyone else blew. He really hoped that counted.
His head was pounding by then, a real ache instead of a hum, tucked right behind his left eye. He pressed two fingers there without thinking and Veeronica asked if he was all right and he said fine, just a lot of smoke, which wasn't even close to true but was close enough to believable that nobody pushed.
A blink.
Chance was leaning back in his chair now. "Three years," Chance said, apparently continuing a sentence Elliot hadn't heard the start of. "Give or take. That's not bad, for this place."
"Give or take," Elliot repeated, and smiled like the number meant something solid to him, like he hadn't spent the last several seconds trying to work out what he might have said right before it, what expression he'd worn, whether "give or take" was a joke he'd already laughed at once.
Nobody else noticed a thing. Why would they?
From where they sat, Elliot had gotten a little quiet in the middle of his own birthday, a little overwhelmed maybe, the way people got when they weren't used to being handed things instead of handing them out.
Noob patted his arm and said something sweet about how he deserved this, all of it, and meant it so plainly that Elliot felt the words land somewhere real even through the static of not knowing what he'd missed.
Veeronica refilled his drink without being asked.
When the party had mostly died down, 007n7 caught his eye from across the fire not long after that. He tipped his head toward the treeline, once, and slipped off into the dark like he expected Elliot to follow without being told twice.
Elliot followed.
The noise fell away fast once they were a few dozen feet out, muffled down to something almost gentle, and his head eased with it, the throb dialing back down to its usual low hum.
Easier to hold onto himself out here. Fewer voices competing for the same narrow space in him.
The air was fresh too, and Elliot tried to get more air back into his lungs to bring himself back in reality, because it was harder to pretend you were listening when you were on a one-on-one conversation.
"Okay, uh," 007n7 said, stopping near something tarp-covered leaned against a tree, hands doing their usual nervous work against each other. "I… wanted to give you this away from everyone. Not because it's bad. Just. It felt like a you-and-me thing."
He pulled the tarp off. The scooter stood underneath it, frame straightened, wheel true, every dent gone.
"You fixed it," Elliot said, and meant it as a real question this time, not the automatic one from before. He slowly circled around it, in wonder at all its red glory.
He’d figured if anyone finally got around to it, it'd be Builderman. He's the one who actually knows how metal's supposed to sit. So it was safe to say Elliot was pleasantly surprised.
007n7 rubbed the back of his neck. "I mean, yeah, I went to him for tips. A bunch of times, actually, I had no idea what I was doing at first. But he wouldn't let me say he helped. Said it should just be from me. That… you'd know it was me trying either way."
"That's..." Elliot looked at the scooter, then at him. "That's really sweet, actually. Both of you."
007n7 went a shade darker even in the low light, and looked at the ground, and then back up, and there was something in his face right then that Elliot almost had time to read before the drop came.
It hit harder than the others had all night. A full, silent skip, like a held breath that didn't come back for a while. When it let go, 007n7 was closer than he'd been, close enough that Elliot could feel the warmth coming off him in the cold air, and his face had gone soft and open in a way it hadn't been a second ago, waiting on something, hopeful and a little scared of being hopeful.
Elliot had no idea what had happened in between.
His head screamed behind his eye.
And for one horrible second, another thought surfaced with it.
Don't ruin this.
It wasn't phrased like he would have phrased it.
It wasn't even in his voice.
Elliot stared at 007n7.
He had the strangest, coldest feeling that someone else had been standing here.
Someone who knew what this conversation was.
Someone who had known what to say.
Someone who had left him the consequences and expected him to carry them.
He kept his face as still as he could manage and ran through what he had.
Okay, Elliot, what do you have?
The scooter, fixed, between them. 007n7 standing closer than the conversation alone would explain. That look, unguarded, like he'd just said something he couldn't take back and was waiting to find out if it had landed.
"Sorry," 007n7 said, quiet, misreading the silence exactly the way Elliot was afraid he would. "Was that too much? You don't have to say anything back, I just wanted you to actually know, finally, instead of..."
"No," Elliot said, fast, grabbing for the only safe answer he had. "No, it's not too much. I'm glad you said it."
Whatever it was.
007n7's whole face changed, relief breaking over it so plainly that Elliot's chest hurt with the guessing he'd just done, the gamble of it, the not knowing if he'd just answered a joke or a confession or something in between and would have to spend the next however long finding out sideways, the way he found out everything, through what other people gave back to him without meaning to.
"Yeah?" 007n7 said, and reached out, careful, like he still expected to be told no at the last second, and took Elliot's hand.
Elliot let him.
Whatever had actually been said, whatever he'd apparently just agreed to, holding on back felt like the only correct thing to do with it now. He curled his fingers around 007n7's, testing the weight of it, and 007n7's grip only got a little firmer in response, like that was exactly what he'd been hoping for.
Okay, Elliot thought. Okay. This is good. Whatever I said, it must have been the right thing, because 007n7 hadn't looked this at ease around him in a long time. Maybe ever. That had to count for something.
His head still throbbed, but it had gone quiet in a different way now, less painful and more like it had simply worn itself out. He let it fold back down under the warmth of 007n7's hand in his, small and steady, the tips of his fingers a little rough from whatever hackers did with their hands.
I don't need to know exactly what I said, Elliot told himself, and found, oddly, that he meant it.
Whatever it was, it made 007n7 smile like that. That was enough to go on.
And it was sweet, all of it, whatever had led up to it. 007n7's thumb moved once over his knuckles, absent, like he wasn't even doing it on purpose, just needed some part of himself touching some part of Elliot. Elliot squeezed back, gentle, and felt something in his chest loosen that had been tight all day.
For a moment, that was enough to work with, even without the rest of it.
They walked back toward the fire like that, hands loose together, and nobody said anything about it except Chance, who made an exaggerated noise like he'd won a bet with himself, and Shedletsky, who ‘demanded’ details nobody was going to give.
Later, once the fire had burned down and everyone had drifted off toward their beds one by one, Elliot found a plate waiting outside his door.
The last slice of cake, no note, because Taph probably delivered it.
He sat on the edge of his bed with the plate balanced carefully in his lap, the warmth of someone else's hand still faintly lingering in his own, and tried to lay out the whole night in order.
Start to end.
He always did this after.
It was easier if he put everything somewhere. The things he remembered himself, the things he remembered because someone else had said them, and the things that existed only because he could look at the evidence afterward and work backwards.
The banner.
The fire.
The cake.
The wish he couldn't remember making, followed by the part he knew he had done because everyone else had been doing it too.
The scooter.
007n7.
Builderman.
A conversation somewhere between the trees that had apparently changed something between them.
That last part was the worst.
He could remember standing beside the scooter. He could remember the red of it, the way the metal caught the firelight. He could remember 007n7's face afterward, the relief in it, the way his hand had felt.
His thumb rubbed slowly over the place where 007n7's fingers had been.
He could remember the beginning of the conversation.
He could remember the end.
There was a whole piece of himself missing between them.
He stared at the floor.
This was the secret.
Not the headaches. Not the moments where conversations seemed to begin halfway through. Not even the strange little gaps that everyone else could mistake for tiredness or distraction.
The secret was that this happened all the time.
Not every hour. Not every day.
Just often enough that Elliot had learned how to live around it.
He had learned to smile when someone laughed at something he didn't remember saying. He had learned to say yeah when someone continued a conversation he couldn't remember starting. He had learned to look at his own hands when he came back and quietly work out what they had been doing.
He had learned to reconstruct himself from evidence.
Nobody knew.
Nobody could.
Because what was he supposed to tell them?
Three years, give or take, and not one person in that cabin knew there was a give or take to it at all.
That was the worst part.
He had been here for three years, and even that number was something he had to trust other people to give him.
Three years, apparently.
Three years of mornings and nights and arguments and meals and birthdays and deaths and laughter and everything in between.
Three years of his own life.
And there were pieces of it he had never been there for.
Elliot looked down at the cake.
The frosting had started to soften at the edges.
He didn’t want to try remembering the day again, because sometimes if he remembered harder he would forget harder, too.
God.
He wished he could remember.
Not everything.
He didn't need everything.
Just this.
Just one day.
His birthday.
One important day in his life where people had gone out of their way to make him happy, where there had been a cake waiting for him and presents wrapped in whatever scraps they could find, where Noob had been excited and Veeronica had cooked and everyone had gathered around a fire because there wasn't any wax in this place.
One day where he was supposed to be present.
And he'd lost pieces of it anyway.
Elliot lowered his head into his hands.
For once, he didn't care whether the missing pieces would come back.
He just wished he'd been there when they happened.
He simply ate the cake Taph had left him. It was good. Someone had gotten the frosting right the second time.