[ Twenty five minutes, is Nathan's guess. Give or take. And then he pulls away.
Not quite quick enough to mask the brief blip of confusion, the uptick that sparks away from a distant, steady core. The thank you tips towards something uneasy, and Nathan gently slips his wrist out of Ian's hold. All Nathan can do is nod back, though that tip of his chin is slow. Measured. When a wild animal stops thrashing, it's dangerous to be satisfied with it. It's not there for you. It wasn't calmed by you. It chose to stay.
For whatever reason -- loneliness or misery or terror or something else overwhelming altogether, like fear, the real primal fear of something larger and deadlier and more urgent coming back -- it stayed.
Nathan wets his bottom lip. He opens his mouth, a little bit, in the way that people do when they're preparing to say something. Takes a short inhale of breath that comes out loud, like a punctuation mark. An opening parenthesis.
Instead, he hesitates. Says, ]
Alright.
[ A full stop. Nathan's never been a you're welcome kind of guy anyway. ]
I'll get you some water. Stay here.
[ So he gets up. That soft noise of exertion again, though he takes a single step forward, bends to take that bottle of tofu cactus tequila or whatever the fuck it is. Tucks it under his arm, but he's not throwing it out.
Walks out. The door to the stall swings a little when he exits. When he comes back, it's silently, with two full bottles of room temp water. No painkillers or tylenol. Them's the breaks in rationed supplytime, California. ]
no subject
Not quite quick enough to mask the brief blip of confusion, the uptick that sparks away from a distant, steady core. The thank you tips towards something uneasy, and Nathan gently slips his wrist out of Ian's hold. All Nathan can do is nod back, though that tip of his chin is slow. Measured. When a wild animal stops thrashing, it's dangerous to be satisfied with it. It's not there for you. It wasn't calmed by you. It chose to stay.
For whatever reason -- loneliness or misery or terror or something else overwhelming altogether, like fear, the real primal fear of something larger and deadlier and more urgent coming back -- it stayed.
Nathan wets his bottom lip. He opens his mouth, a little bit, in the way that people do when they're preparing to say something. Takes a short inhale of breath that comes out loud, like a punctuation mark. An opening parenthesis.
Instead, he hesitates. Says, ]
Alright.
[ A full stop. Nathan's never been a you're welcome kind of guy anyway. ]
I'll get you some water. Stay here.
[ So he gets up. That soft noise of exertion again, though he takes a single step forward, bends to take that bottle of tofu cactus tequila or whatever the fuck it is. Tucks it under his arm, but he's not throwing it out.
Walks out. The door to the stall swings a little when he exits. When he comes back, it's silently, with two full bottles of room temp water. No painkillers or tylenol. Them's the breaks in rationed supplytime, California. ]