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Naim wakes up on Ryan’s shoulder. He stirs groggily, convinced that he’s got some type of sunburn from beyond the old bus window. Asleep, he had dreamed of Ryan—not of that thing—and he knows, waking up now and glancing at Ryan, who’s resting quietly with his eyes closed, that he much prefers this.
Pressed up against the screen of his back door with that desperate shadow has nothing on being pressed up against the Ryan he has now, forever; warm blood and synchronized breaths. Naim leans his head against the window, the turbulence of the road transmitting directly to his brain, and stares at him. Unabashedly, in a way he’s never yet allowed himself to do. This is the longest they’ve ever been with just each other; no classes, scriptures, or service to pull them apart. Even on the weekends, it was unsightly for them to be gone for more than two hours or so.
His light curls flutter over his forehead; someone’s cracked a window. There’s a split wound through the end of his eyebrow that had made Naim’s stomach hurt on sight, but Ryan had told him he felt “rugged,” which soothed him well enough. His rested expression twitches as he moves for Naim’s touch, and finds it lacking. He turns his head, and his eyes peek open, dusty blue like the sky. “Hi,” he says roughly.
“Hi,” Naim says back. “Am I sunburnt?”
Ryan reaches out and brushes his thumb over Naim’s cheekbone. Naim suddenly feels lightheaded with excitement—this is the mundane, everyday gestures that they could never get away with in Bandee. This is what they’ve been waiting for. “Mm,” Ryan hums. “Don’t think so. Why, you feel hot or somethin’?” he asks with a stupid grin.
Naim pushes his hand away. “Something like that,” he murmurs with a laugh. “Can I ask you something?” he asks next, hearing his own voice getting smaller.
Ryan nods dreamily at him, finding his hand and drawing loopy circles over his palm. Naim looks down and watches the lineless path his fingertips leave on his skin. He feels warm and fuzzy—and safe—which is why he finds the courage to ask it now. “I still don’t… What was with the rock-throwing thing?”
Ryan sighs, but his fingertips continue to billow over Naim’s palm. “Hunter and I were very, um… complicated. He went through these moods. Where sometimes he believed the only thing that was going to save him, I guess, was to stone us down. “Y’know,” Ryan says quietly, his fingers intertwining into Naim’s, “like men in the Bible.”
Naim lets his hand rest in Ryan’s, their shared rings slotting beside each other like keys in a lock. When he had seen that—Ryan and Hunter pelting each other with large rocks that thumped aggressively into their bodies—it had felt like the world was caving in. He hadn’t been able to wrap his head around it. It was release? It was self-harm? It was betrayal? It was too big for Naim to carry, which is why he had brought it to Hunter’s father; he had condemned them all in the process of being weak.
“Did you ever, like, see him?” Naim asks, so very aware of how his voice is shrinking. How jealous the question sounds. How self-centered.
“What, like—?” Ryan’s brows furrow. “No, Naim,” he tells him softly. “I was dragged out of the church, and it was you. It always looked like you. I told you,” Ryan says, brushing at a bit of Naim’s crumpled bangs, “I didn’t want it to look like some other dickhead anyway.”
Naim lets the cool breeze of Ryan’s touch over his forehead ground him. (“I want it to look like you,” Ryan had told him right by the doorway, where they were both walking on eggshells, so incredibly aware that they couldn’t touch, couldn’t even look remotely taken by each other.) And it had looked like him, Naim’s sure now. It had, and that’s why Ryan was bleeding when Naim found him at the bus stop, of course. Obviously.
“I really am sorry,” Naim manages to say, swallowing down all the shame that thickly coats his throat. “I should have left it alone, I didn’t—”
“Stop,” Ryan says, squeezing his hand. “You know who already apologized, actually? That thing did,” he laughs.
“We’re not the same,” Naim grumbles out. Heat rises to his face as Ryan crawls closer to him with the limited space they’ve been gifted. His wild curls brush into Naim’s person.
“No, of course not.” Ryan grins. “You’re much better. Especially like this,” he says, gently leaning in to kiss Naim unafraid, far enough. His hand fits onto Naim’s cheek, his fingers caressing.
Naim relaxes into him, the balance of their lips, the give and take, something he’s used to. Something he used to drown the whole school day out just looking forward to; bouncing his knee under his desk class after class. Like a lazy days at the mill (rip), Ryan works his mouth open easily, tongue brushing over teeth, and Naim just basks in it. Ryan’s undivided attention was like a ray of the sun, and here they were: no clouds to cover their days ever again. More or less.
“Wait,” Naim mutters against Ryan’s mouth. “Did you kiss yours?”
He feels Ryan smile. A little breath of laughter breezing over his lips. “What, you didn’t kiss yours?”
Right, Naim thinks. The photobooth, the bathroom, wherever else Ryan was and Naim wasn’t for the week and a half where Ryan was fighting alone. A week and a half where Ryan believed Naim was just hurting him, for fun, for shits. Naim squeezes his eyes shut tight, and kisses Ryan again. I’msosorry, I’msosorry, I’msosorry, he wants his lips to say.
“No,” he answers instead. “Almost,” he admits. It’s a little more concise than saying, Yeah, I was a second away from tonguing the thing that looks like you through the screen door the other night, actually.
Ryan just shrugs. “Sue me. I missed you,” he says.
Naim hums, pressing his forehead into Ryan’s as they part. His lips are pink, so alive looking as they curl into a smile. “Me too,” he tells Ryan.
He’s gonna commit himself to a long time of making it up to him.
The bus is eastbound, hitting the end of its line in Eucla by the 12 hour mark. Naim’s body feels heavy with a lack of movement combined with the soreness of a fight for his life, but he’d rather be in the middle of the cliffs than get dragged back to Bandee, kicking and screaming.
Ryan holds onto his hand getting off the bus. Naim thinks that Ryan hasn’t let go of his hand since the morning, actually. In no world is he going to be the one to break the casual touch; he shoves his headphones into his pocket with his free hand, and lets Ryan lead them away.
They find the cheapest motel possible, with the lamest tourist servo attached to it on the edge of town. From it, Ryan steals two Cup of Noodles, a packet of cookies, an extra lighter, and a gimmicky shirt.
He holds up the t-shirt while they’re in the store; a garishly orange fabric with blue and white lettering: EUCLA, AUSTRALIA. Naim huffs out a laugh. All he has are the clothes on his back, as cliché as it is, and sometime soon, they just won’t cut it, he knows. “That’ll look good on me,” he tells Ryan.
“Nah,” Ryan says. “It’ll look good on me. You’ll just have to be happy in my clothes,” he grins, balling the shirt up and tucking it into his giant jacket. “C’mon,” he says. “Just like takin’ extra bread behind the pastor’s back at Communion.”
He flicks a pack of condoms next. “What about these?”
“You cunt,” Naim hisses, and swats his hand away.
Outside, what looks like backpackers have a small bonfire going. Naim relaxes at the sight of the flame, although he can feel Ryan tense. On one hand, it’s a sign they’re safe. On the other hand, it’s a reminder of how that safety is fleeting.
Sitting beside the fire, a woman with a bright bandana and a cross necklace takes a sip of her beer, and languidly does the Sign over her body. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The man beside her with a pair of sunglasses on his head despite the sunset quickly does the same. With a simple ease, he says, “Lord, bless us for our happy journey. Bless us for our joyful nights. Bless us for our love, and all the love of those we meet. Thank you. Amen.” The woman repeats with a melodic laugh, Amen.
Naim stares at them, thinking, That’s it? Where was their hope for fear, their gratefulness for shame? Where was tradition? The way you’re supposed to pray?
His breath catches in his throat when the woman suddenly looks over to him, and she smiles. And then Ryan pulls him gently by where their hands are interlocked—always interlocked—and Naim quickly follows.
“You ever think our church was wrong?” Naim asks. His hair’s damp from the shower, and all the clothes he’s wearing are Ryan’s, soft and covered in his cologne. Ryan had sat outside the door to the bathroom for him upon sheepish request, but now he’s lounging over the one bed (it was cheaper) watching the TV run boring news stories.
Ryan laughs out a scoff. “Well, duh,” he says. He’s wearing the Eucla t-shirt, and he moves over in bed so that Naim can sit beside him, back up against the headboard.
“I mean, like,” Naim pauses. “D’you reckon all of Christianity is wrong?”
Ryan shrugs. “Dunno. But the only Christianity I know is our church’s, and I’m not a big fan if you couldn’t tell.”
Naim hums. He thinks about before they moved, how his mom had explained that the church in their town was just no longer up to their standards. Two girls had moved in around that time, older girls that seemed to live together and attended church hand-in-hand with pretty smiles and artsy jeans; one was never too far from the other. His parents had started fighting around that time, too. About the girls. An affair, Naim’s mind had supplied him with, but he never fully believed.
That awful thing that was coming for Tom—Naim’s pretty sure it was just his mother’s personal ex-communication at the end of the day.
His father. He hasn’t thought about his father in a while. In an act of solidarity with his mother, he had blocked the whole existence of the divorce out of his mind, but now he thinks—if his mother proved her capability to be wrong, so entirely devastatingly wrong—didn’t that mean his father had a capability to be right?
“Whaddya thinking about, huh, Naim?” Ryan asks, his shoulder pushing into his.
“Nothing,” Naim says. He lets his weight sink against Ryan—12 hours of just them, by themselves, happy. What he would have done for this. What he did do. “Maybe we could hitchhike to my dad’s.”
“Your dad?” Ryan asks, tearing his gaze away from the TV to stare at Naim.
Naim shrugs. He doubts his mom would call his dad to check for him, that is, if she’s even looking for him in the first place. It’s a mean thought, he thinks. She’s probably terrified. (“We need fear, Naim,” she had told him. Naim felt made of stone at that moment; she, Medusa.)
“He lives right outside Sydney now, I think,” Naim says quietly, spinning Ryan’s snake ring around his finger in a fidget. “It’s just another 12 hours, right?”
“Yeah,” Ryan says. “But I mean, is that…” Naim can hear the sentence without his words, Ryan’s voice ringing clear as day through his head: Is that safe?
Naim slowly nods. “I’m starting to think so.”
The TV suddenly buzzes, and a warning segment plays with an old school picture of Naim and a testament from his mother. “Shit,” Naim mutters. Her video feed next to the news anchor, his mother looks pale and one-note, her hair flat and straight and her cardigan knit and pulled tight. Even her background is empty, the colorless grass full of snakes against the not-quite-blue-enough sky. Naim hadn’t realized how beige his life had gotten in Bandee over the months, but next to the rich navy blue of the anchorwoman’s dress shirt, he sees the gaping lack of visual stimulation.
"Ha, look at you," Ryan says, nudging him further. Both their eyes are trained on the TV, watching Naim's mother speak low and morose. She holds her hand over her cross necklace protectively, a habit she had picked up more and more intensely over the last year.
"Shut up," Naim tells him before he can say anything more. The picture's from the first day of Year 11, he thinks, before Bandee and curses and death. His hair's longer and more wild, much to his mother's chagrin, but his father had ruffled his hand through it a minute before, making the small smile on Naim's face true.
"At least people are looking for you, right?" Ryan shrugs. "Every time I disappeared, my parents seemed happy enough to just decide I had offed myself."
Naim frowns. His first day with Ryan at the mill—poking snakes, scaling scaffolding—he was honestly convinced that Ryan was untouchable by death, untouchable from the threat of hell that their pastor always held above their head; until he was staring into the bleeding claw marks that trailed down Ryan's spine. "If they think that's what happened to you," Naim mutters, turning to look at him, "then they don't know you at all."
Ryan cracks a small smile, leaning in until his curls brush at Naim's cheek. His eyes sparkle ever so slightly. "No, they don't, do they?"
For a second, they just stare at each other, and then Ryan presses his lips into Naim’s and curls his hand into his hair. Naim melts into him, the wax to Ryan’s flame.
He hopes that life outside Bandee can always be easy like this, ignoring the existential threat upon their well-being, of course.
"Wanna share a cig?" Ryan asks suddenly, pulling away from Naim and rolling to the bedside table. He grabs a pack of cigarettes and shakes it. "I stole these from my dad."
Naim huffs to hide his laugh, and watches as Ryan holds a cigarette between his lips and lights it with—hey, Naim's pretty sure that's one of his lighters. Ryan breathes out a smoky exhale and smiles, crawling back to Naim and situating himself over him in an easy straddle, swirls of secondhand between them.
"I thought your dad was a man of god," Naim says, smiling through the giddy awareness that Ryan’s knees are holding him still. He lets his hands linger around Ryan’s waist; how could someone even try to hold down someone as free as him? "Isn't this a vice?" he asks.
Ryan nods, taking another drag. "Oh, 'course," he says, the hand not on his cigarette trailing over Naim’s collar, Ryan’s shirt. "But that's the thing. Everybody hates what they aren't, but stays being what they are."
“Yeah?” Naim asks, eyes stuck on Ryan’s lips where smoke creeps out of in gray, alluring swirls.
“Yeah,” Ryan repeats. And then he breathes that smoke right into Naim’s lungs, and Naim couldn’t care less about any of the side effects preached.
The next day, they catch six more hours of travel on another bus after Ryan steals a few packaged muffins from the servo. Naim buys them bus tickets with money he pocketed from his mother’s wallet right before hitting the road. For another day, it’s them, the ever-turning of the wheels below them, and the Australian expanse.
The town they get dropped in is bigger, more buildings and sidewalks and people as they inch towards real civilization. There’s a few restaurants, a playground with a few kids, and a little church with giant doors flung open.
Naim lingers by the doorway as Ryan does a small lap around the town square. He stares down rows dark-wood pews lit bright by colorful stained glass. A woman on one side hangs her head in prayer, trying to keep a smile off her face as her toddler son babbles quietly—something their pastor would ask to remove him for, ignoring his age. Behind the woman, two girls sit with one lying on the other’s shoulder, an air of peace as their hair falls onto each other. Leaning against what looks like Catholic confessional, two older boys chitchat under their breath, their eyes sparkling. The way Ryan’s eyes sparkle.
Naim jolts as Ryan comes up behind him, draping his chin over his shoulder. “Hey,” Ryan says with an amused huff. “Motel for the night, out of here by morning? We can be in Sydney tomorrow.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Naim responds breathlessly. He’s still distracted by the two boys, not more than a handful of years older than themselves, as they tilt their heads and roll their eyes at one another. And then the one with shaggy hair subtly twines his fingers into the palm of the one with a scar over his cheek.
“So nosy,” Ryan mutters with a laugh. “What’re you starin’ at now, Naim?”
Naim turns and catches Ryan’s head with his hands, pressing into him a deep kiss. Ryan kisses back, but his fingers wrap around Naim’s wrists as he warily whispers, “Hey.”
“We’re good,” Naim whispers back, willing Ryan to relax into him—smiling into the kiss when he does. There was never a world where Naim had even dreamed of kissing Ryan—kissing anyone—in front of a church. For weeks, he believed he’d never kiss Ryan in front of anyone at all. And yet things were different now; because this church was not Bandee’s church, and these people were not Bandee’s people. Less and less people are like Bandee’s people, Naim begins to think.
The world is not like Bandee’s world, is it now?
He kisses Ryan until he feels dizzy. They splurge on pancakes for dinner.
“Have you seen the thing?” Ryan asks. “Since we left?”
They’re sitting in the back so that they have more room for the giant map that Ryan swiped; Naim’s scouring the street names on the edge of Sydney for anything that sounds even slightly familiar. There’s a steady click, click, click coming from Ryan as he sparks Naim’s lighter over and over. He holds the flame up to the corner of the map, and the thin paper starts to disintegrate.
Naim pulls the map away, the wind of the movement snuffing Ryan’s flame. “You pyro,” he says as Ryan laughs. Then he considers the original question: He shrugs. “Sometimes. Out of the corner of my eye, I think.”
Ryan flips the cap of the lighter back over the flint. “Me too,” he says. “What does yours look like?”
“Like you, cunt,” Naim snorts.
“Yeah, but like,” Ryan drawls, “you’re not listening to me, mate. Like… what’s it wearing?”
Naim scoffs out a laugh at the question, as trivial as it is. “Uh, I dunno,” he says, glancing out the window as if maybe he’ll get a peek. As if it’ll be standing there beside the sparse trees and the dying billboards. You never know. “It looks like you, our first time at the mill,” he says. “Y’know, the tank top, the necklace.”
“Ohh,” Ryan snickers. “And you were into that.”
“Well I kissed you, didn’t I?” Naim says, batting away Ryan’s hand as he tries to poke at Naim.
“Nah, I kissed you. Like I distinctly remember it,” Ryan tells him. Brags, even, before he purses his lips. “Thought I fucked it all up for a good moment, actually.”
Naim suppresses a smile. “Yeah, I thought that, too,” he says, laughing when Ryan punches him in the shoulder. “So what does your fucking demon look like, then?”
Ryan leans back on the weirdly-patterned bus seat, his head tipping over the headrest. “It’s you. It’s got your giant jacket, and your backpack. And it has this fucked-up way of talking. It says my name, and it’s like—it’s like you’re in my head.”
“Ryan,” Naim mockingly whispers.
“Fuck you,” Ryan snorts. “It’s also got a knife in its side. I stabbed it the other night,” he says with a casual shrug.
Naim feels his brows furrow. Ryan still has that slit through his eyebrow, scabbed over and pink, but Naim guesses he hadn’t realized just how close to it Ryan was that night. They were both fighting for their lives, for each other, he reckons. “Did that hurt it?” Naim asks.
“Nah,” Ryan says. “It couldn’t’ve cared less. Reckon the only thing it hates is fire.”
Naim hums. “Or maybe just warmth.” Ryan raises a lazy eyebrow at him. “When I was in the mill, I reached out and put my hand against its cheek, and… it froze. It dropped the pipe and everything,” Naim mutters, remembering just how close to death he had felt; like a feral kitten desperate to escape a bear trap. “It was like it didn’t understand.”
Ryan hums back, and then dramatically falls to the side, lying himself over the empty seat to his left. Playing dead. Naim smiles.
“It’s like an animal,” Naim says, watching his shirt ride up at his hips as he stretches his shoulders.
“Eh,” Ryan shrugs. “I think it’s more conscious than that. But then again.” He peeks his eyes open, the slightest of dimples poking into his cheeks. “I don’t ever wanna be close enough to it to figure it out.”
Naim bites down on a smile as Ryan’s hand finds his, ringed fingers dappling over his skin like a pianist’s. “D’you think it’s realistic?” Naim asks him. “Staying together, 24 hours a day for the rest of our lives?”
“Realistic?” Ryan snorts. “‘Course not. But it is a hell of a sweet deal, isn’t it?”
They walk around Sydney like lost tourists; Naim’s sure the giant fold-up map looks more ridiculous with every passing moment, but he’s decently certain they’re on the right street.
His father had moved after the divorce, but only a few miles away from their original home; although much further into the city. Naim feels as though he knows these neighborhoods well enough, though, from field trips and day drives. Ryan tags along after him like some type of puppy let out of the kennel for the first time; he seems excited, but at the same time, he’s got a tight grip on Naim’s pocket, as if one of them will blow away in the wind. Naim reckons he can’t blame him; he’s Bandee born-n-raised, after all. And, as Naim’s beginning to remember, the rest of the world is much more forgiving, in a surely terrifying way.
Naim pulls him into some type of convenience store that he barely recognizes—or maybe he just recognizes the brand of cigarettes advertised in the window that his father started smoking once his mother dragged empty boxes into the house. At the counter, a girl with curly hair scribbles numbers into a sudoku puzzle. She glances up when Naim asks, “Um, I’m looking for Tom Reid? I’m—”
“Holy shit,” she says. Naim feels Ryan stiffen behind him, his easygoingness becoming a black hole of uncertainty. “Yeah, I—” she starts. “You’re his kid. Shit. Okay,” she says, ripping off a piece of her puzzle paper. “Usually I don’t give out addresses, but—here, he lives on the next street over.”
She slides the paper across the counter, a street name and a string of numbers written in loopy cursive, and Naim pockets it. “Thanks,” he tells her.
“Yeah. Good luck,” she says sheepishly as Naim and Ryan turn to leave. “Bandee’s, um… something else.”
“Yeah,” Naim says weakly.
“Fuckin’ right,” Ryan mumbles.
His father has moved to a small townhouse with a blue door and a green plant on the tiny porch. The setting sun shines over the metal address numbers by the door. Ryan whispers to him, “Everything’s so… colorful.”
Naim catches his hand, squeezes it, and holds it behind his back as he knocks.
His father looks older. Tired, with a few more gray hairs, but nothing about the air around him suggests a stagnant unhappiness. In fact, there’s a spark in his eyes that Naim had always stared in the mirror, waiting for inherit, that only grows when realizes what this is.
“Naim?” he says, a little shocked. He stares at Naim the way onlookers stare at museum exhibits, Naim wants to mutter; although he’s unsure if Ryan would understand it. “Naim, your mum—”
“Please don’t call her,” Naim says to his dad—the first thing he’s said to him in months and months. “You can’t, Dad.”
His dad purses his lips, but his expression seems to soften after a moment. His gaze flicks to Ryan, who squeezes Naim’s hand with his guard up, his slow breathing tickling Naim’s skin.
“Okay,” he says, with a worryingly deep sense of understanding. “Come in, boys, please.”
“I am… familiar with the work of certain Deliverance Healers,” his father says uneasily. His twiddles his thumbs in a chair he pulled from his small kitchen as Naim and Ryan sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch. Ryan’s hands are clasped in his lap. Naim’s fidgeting, just like his dad. “As is your mum,” his father continues. “But it doesn’t happen over here much. Unlike in… smaller towns.”
“I know,” Naim says thickly. “I know she knew.” Ryan breathes unsteadily next to him.
“And this is,” his father says, motioning towards Ryan, “your, um…”
“This is Ryan,” Naim tells him. “Yeah.”
His father nods. “Sure. I assumed. Nice to meet you, son. Under the circumstances, of course.”
“Right. Hi,” Ryan says, though he sounds so unlike himself. “Nice to meet you.”
Naim stares up at the wooden cross sitting on his father’s wall; Jesus with his head hung low. After a handful of more questions, his father begins talking about how they must be exhausted, and how he’s going to buy them real food. Naim is so relived at the idea of something less than half-shitty that he grabs Ryan’s hand without even thinking.
It seems to help Ryan relax. Naim keeps meaning to ask Ryan about what happened with him and the thing the night that feels so long ago now; but the bruises over his collarbone say enough.
He cups Naim’s face and kisses him before he gets in the shower. “I’m glad we’re here,” he mutters against Naim’s mouth.
Naim hums. “Me too.”
His father resheets the miniature guest bedroom, and tells Naim it’s all his. To Ryan, he offers to set up the pull-out couch, and Ryan accepts, although Naim suspects he only says yes to appear polite under Tom’s parental gaze.
Naim wolfs down everything his father makes for dinner in a way he doesn’t think he’s done since he was ten years old. Ryan seems to do the same, the stolen noodles and pastries they’ve had over the last two days leaving much to be desired. Over dinner, his father talks about how a custody battle will be a long and arduous process, but he’d do this for Naim, he’d do anything for Naim. And Ryan, too, he tacks on. A package deal, surely.
“Well,” Ryan says between bites of mac ‘n cheese, “I’d do anythin’ for Naim, too. So I reckon you and I are the same.”
And Naim’s dad—he laughs. Naim can’t help but let out a laugh beside him, despite the warm flush clawing at his face.
“You know what, Ryan?” his father says. “I reckon we are.”
Thirty minutes after the small house has gone to bed, Ryan slips through the door to the guest bedroom, just as Naim expected he would. He climbs into bed beside Naim, and Naim doesn’t even worry about whether it’s really him or not—he knows it so deeply in his bones. This is the gentleness that Ryan likes to pretend he doesn’t have; this is the unadulterated care that no godly dickhead could replicate.
He rests on his stomach, his chin coming to rest just at Naim’s shoulder, and his lax breaths align with Naim’s heartbeat. “Bein’ emancipated doesn’t seem like too terrible of an idea, does it?” Ryan says, soft and amused into Naim’s skin. “Neither does bein’ ex-communicated.”
Naim cards his fingers through Ryan’s hair, his light curls still slightly damp and so soft. “I might try again someday,” he whispers.
“Try what?” Ryan asks.
Naim shrugs. “Church.”
“Huh.” Ryan hums. He pushes himself up on his palms, holding himself over Naim, paralleled. “Really?”
Naim tilts his head, and stares shamelessly at his lips. “Yeah,” he murmurs. It’s not all bad, he thinks. Not all versions of it, at least, just based on what he’s seen, three days back into the real world. “Maybe. You wouldn’t have to come—”
“Obviously I’d fuckin’ come,” Ryan snorts. And then he rolls off the bed and says, “One second.”
When he comes back into the room, he lies on his back, his shoulder pressing into Naim’s, and holds up a silver cross on a chain between them. It’s not like his mother’s, plain and straightforward, brutalist; this one is slightly worn, a little crooked either, but with intricate designs carved over it.
“I’ve been carrying this around for good luck,” Ryan says as it swings between them. “But I reckon it starts to lose its charm the longer you’re a disbeliever. It’d probably work better ‘round your neck, huh?”
Naim reaches out and clasps it in his palm. He wouldn’t go as far to say he’s a believer these days—their whole situation reeks of pure, human cruelty—but it’s a trinket of Ryan’s, and he wants it against his skin as soon as is acceptable. He pulls it over his head and lets it rest over his collarbone.
“S’nice,” he whispers, the silver shining off in the lines of moonlight coming from the window. “But y’know, I already feel lucky.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ryan asks.
“Yeah. I’m here with you,” Naim mutters.
Ryan snickers. “Sap.”
“Dickhead.”
“Cunt.”
“Shut up,” Naim tells him. Ryan just smiles, his light curls framed around his face. He laughs to himself, and Naim does honestly feel incredibly lucky—despite the trials and tribulations, despite judgement day on earth. The sound of Ryan’s laugh is pure luck in a melody, Naim is so sure. “What d’you wanna do tomorrow?” he asks.
Ryan stretches his arms over his head, his knuckles brushing the headboard behind them. “Mm,” he hums. “Enjoy ourselves. Have some fuckin’ fun for once, yeah?”
Naim snorts. “There aren’t as many abandoned buildings for you to throw shit around here.”
“Well then I reckon there’s no where for you to light fires, either,” Ryan teases.
“Shut up,” Naim tells him. It was survival after all—and anyway, Ryan’s the one who’s been playing with his lighter for days.
Ryan just grins, turning over and draping himself over Naim on his forearms. “Make me,” he says. “Just fuckin’ try, I dare you.”
Naim rolls his eyes, but the smile creeps onto his lips as Ryan’s fingers crawl over the his necklace, wrapping around the chain. And he scoffs at the challenge, but he’s giddy the moment that Ryan’s nose brushes his, their lips fitting together quietly as Naim’s hand finds Ryan’s hair again.
And he could make the argument that everything in their small scope of life was praying against them; that all their cards were dealt unfairly by biased dealers who were sworn to be divine. He could fight the thing that follows them, he could try and kill it, but he knows the only reasons it’s there is because Ryan’s here. And Naim never wants Ryan not here, pressed into his lips and tasting like new toothpaste.
Ryan starts laughing into his mouth for no discernible reason, and Naim laughs back because he’s so, sickeningly happy.
God, Naim thinks—if He’s there—he really is lucky.