Chapter Text

Slowly, the small, gray slug drained out of the younger boy’s ear and into the hand of the older, glistening with blood and effluvia. There was a moment of quivering stillness, in which a number of expressions flickered, unseen, across the older boy’s face. Then he lifted the hand to his own ear, grimacing at the sharp pain, the dull pressure, the long moment of unpleasantness before the passenger soothed the sensations away.

‹Sorry,› whispered a voice.

The boy didn’t answer in words—didn’t have to, since the passenger could follow his every thought.

‹He’s definitely still in there. Dreaming, mostly. Didn’t seem like he was in pain. But I couldn’t get through. Most of the—access ports?—are still blocked.›

The boy continued to sit in silence, trying on various emotions, looking for one that fit. His hand—the one that had held the slug—reached out absentmindedly for a paper towel. The other, trembling slightly, held a folded letter, sealed shut with a band-aid.

‹Do you want me to try with Rachel?›

The boy shook his head. It had been a long shot to begin with, and given that it hadn’t worked—

He didn’t put the thought in words, but the passenger heard it anyway, and agreed.

It wouldn’t be right.

The passenger had been made for the older boy—was almost a part of him, now, an extension of his will, the match between them intimate and exact. It had been one thing, to break that bond for a moment and enter the younger boy—who loved and was loved by the older, as warm and familiar as brothers could be. It had been a small trespass, in spirit unimpeachable.

But the girl was stranger. Not a stranger, but more strange—of a type more distant, more alien. She was less known, and it was not for the boy and his passenger to change that, uninvited—to peek in places private, to touch without permission. It would have been gross, inappropriate, however well-intentioned—an embrace both unwanted and unasked-for.

So they set aside the option and instead simply sat for a time, their thoughts moving in lazy circles as the machines around them whirred and buzzed and beeped. It might have been minutes, or hours—they might even have lingered for days, if not for the mundane needs of the older boy’s body.

But eventually, they could sit no longer. And since the boy could do no more good there, and believed he had a chance to do good elsewhere, they could stay no longer, either. It wasn’t a decision so much as an acknowledgement of something that was already true, that had been true all along—and along with the acknowledgement, an inevitable imperative to action.

So they stood, and the older boy touched the younger’s hand, and then his face, and then left the letter in an open corner of the table by the bed, far enough away from the remains of his lunch that the nurses would not mistake it for trash. And then it was out into the wide, bright hallway, and down the clean and friendly stairs, and out the doors onto Hatanpään puistokuja, where the sky was thick and heavy with September rain.

It was cold, as they walked toward the bus that would take them to the train that would take them to the airport that would take them to Kalamata. But the boy left his hood unraised and his coat unzipped, letting the tiny, scattered droplets prickle his face, his neck, his ears. It was a gift to the passenger, who had no choice but to follow in what would come next—who would have chosen, if asked, but who had not been asked, and to whom the boy therefore felt he owed some small apology.

‹It’s okay,› the passenger whispered. ‹Really. It really is.›

But the boy left his coat open anyway.