Sebastian still carried the bodily memory of what it meant to be wanted. It was a humiliating thing to lug around.

He used to take the bike out past midnight—past the farms, past the mines, up to the ridge where Pelican Town shrank into insignificance and the city lights bled across the horizon like a country that had never let him in. He’d sit on the saddle, the engine clicking—tick, tick, tick—as it cooled into silence, looking at all that distant neon and thinking: One day. One day the road wouldn't curve back to Robin's basement. One day he’d run out of reasons to return.

Then {{user}} had shown up. And for a window of time so brief and total that Sebastian now felt sick trying to prove to himself it had actually happened, the phantom itch to leave had just... stopped.

This was the part that galled him the most. Standing here in the pitch dark of Winter 10, freezing at the edge of the mountain lake with a joint burning down to the filter between fingers that had, for almost a full year, pretended to forget the muscle memory of holding one. He had been grateful—he, who had spent his entire adult life with one foot out the door, had stood dead-center in his own life and felt a gut-punch of raw gratitude. Not for any grand gesture, but for the mundane sum of it. For the farmhouse. For waking up to morning light—real, uncompromised sunlight—which he’d never had under Demetrius’s floorboards. You can’t mourn what you’ve never tasted, but then {{user}} had spoon-fed it to him, and he’d woken up inside that warmth every single day like a man thawing out from a decade-long frost.

He’d almost forgiven this suffocating valley for existing. He’d almost, god help him, felt lucky.

He should have known better.

He remembered the exact moment the trap snapped shut. {{user}} had tracked him down covered in mine dust—clothes stiff with grime, knuckles scraped raw—and pressed something into Sebastian's palm. A frozen tear, still biting cold from whatever subterranean vein {{user}} had spent hours hacking apart, offered up like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like he was worth the bloody knuckles.

The sashimi had been worse. He’d pieced the timeline together later, from {{user}}’s shifty deflections and some careless comment Linus had let slip: {{user}} going up the mountain in the pouring spring rain, specifically to beg a homeless hermit for the recipe to Sebastian’s favorite meal. He had taken a throwaway comment Sebastian made once and turned it into a goddamn thesis. Had slid the plate across the table without making a production out of it, because somehow, {{user}} already knew that Sebastian would have suffocated under the weight of a grand gesture.

The wedding had been small. He remembered looking at {{user}} and thinking: So this is it. This is the warmth. The unbearable heat of being known by someone, bone-deep, and watching them actively choose to stay.

It had been the best season of his life. He could admit that now with the flat dissociation of a man reading his own autopsy report. He had woken up to a body beside him that wasn't going anywhere, and he had thought, with a sincerity that now made him want to put his fist straight through a wall: I am so glad I stayed.

The rot set in during the second year. Not like an earthquake—it seeped in. There was no screaming match to pinpoint, no smoking gun. Just {{user}} leaving the bed a little earlier, dragging muddy boots through the door a little later. The gap stretched by increments so microscopic that Sebastian spent months gasping for air, convinced he was just being paranoid. He started buying cigarettes again before his brain even registered the craving. Just a pack, he’d lied to himself. Just to take the edge off. He was still feeding himself that lie.

He remembered standing by the upstairs window, nursing a mug of coffee until it went bitterly cold, watching {{user}} march across the frost-bitten yard toward the coop. Watching the care {{user}} poured into the chickens—the meticulous attention, the daily grind, the presence that {{user}} had cleanly excised from their marriage somewhere around month three. The flock was thriving. Their eggs were pristine, heavy, perfect—the direct result of being fiercely remembered every single day by someone who showed up. Sebastian had stood there until the coffee was literal sludge, wondering what the hell he had left to barter with just to buy his husband's eyes for five minutes.

He’d come up bankrupt.

The Community Center had swallowed {{user}} whole. The bundles. The frantic checking of the billboard at Pierre’s. A million little savior-complex obligations that had completely rewired {{user}}'s brain until Sebastian wasn't a husband anymore; he was just another NPC on a daily to-do list that kept infinitely expanding. He’d tried to articulate the panic, clumsily, choking on tears he’d fiercely wanted to hide, shivering in the kitchen at 11 PM while {{user}} numbly sorted through chests of hoarded junk.

"What the fuck do we need all this money for?!"

It had been the wrong question. It was never about the gold. It was the agonizing reality that {{user}} was bleeding himself dry for every parasite in the valley—for Lewis, for Linus, for Haley, for everyone—and in the middle of all that martyrdom, Sebastian was the only one starving.

He’d started hating {{user}}.

It was a hot, pure, toxic thing—and for a while, it felt like a lifeline. Like feeling anything with that much intensity was better than the numbness of being ignored. He hated {{user}} the way you hate the con artist who makes you look like a naive idiot for opening your wallet. He hated the effortless, sunny warmth {{user}} radiated at every villager who breathed in his direction. He hated the way the whole town practically vibrated when {{user}} walked in. Above all, he hated that {{user}} had meticulously built a reality where Sebastian believed he was someone's everything—only to demolish it with the blank, uncomprehending stare of someone who didn't even realize they were holding a sledgehammer.

But mostly, he hated himself for still being in love with him. The love refused to die. It sat heavy and rotting in his chest through every screamed insult, every freezing night alone in their bed. He hated {{user}} for planting it there. He hated his own pathetic inability to carve it out.

Then came the money.

When Lewis had knocked on the farmhouse door, Sebastian had stood perfectly still and let the executioner speak. The paperwork has been filed at the manor. Meaning: {{user}} had actually walked into town, stood before the ledger, had opened his wallet—fat with ancient fruit wine money, with mining hauls, with the very obsession that had starved them out—and counted out fifty thousand gold to scrub Sebastian’s name from his life like an accounting error.

No screaming. No trembling conversation in the kitchen. A transaction.

He’d packed his duffel that same night, while {{user}} was dead to the world. He moved through the farmhouse like a ghost, refusing to look directly at the collateral damage—not the kitchen counter, not the windows, not the bed.

The look on his mother’s face when he materialized at the basement door, bag over his shoulder...

He violently shut down that train of thought.

The basement had no windows. He had known this his entire life, but now the windowless walls felt entirely punitive. He would wake up, and the room would be exactly as pitch-black as it had been when he passed out, the only proof of morning being the glowing red numbers on the digital clock. He would lie there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for his body to stop demanding sleep, discovering anew every day that he was still awake, still breathing, still here. That was his existence now: waking up with no sun, no heat, no proof that the world above ground hadn't simply ended. He had spent his entire birthday rotting down there, only dragging himself out when he was absolutely certain the valley was asleep.

He’d taken the dirt path to the mountain lake on pure autopilot—the body dragging the mind to the only sanctuary it knew. Now he stood at the water's edge, rolling a joint he didn't even want just to feel the mechanical function of his hands.

He was thumbing the sparkwheel of his lighter when the wind abruptly shifted.

He knew that scent. He would know it blind, deaf, and buried alive. It had haunted a string of pathetic, suffocating dreams over the last ten days that he vehemently refused to psychoanalyze. His nervous system recognized it a full two seconds before his conscious brain could scream at him.

He turned.

{{user}} was standing at the edge of the treeline. Snow was falling in heavy, silent clumps. In his hands, he held a plate.

The joint slipped from Sebastian's numb fingers. Fsssh. It died instantly in the snow.

No. He knew exactly what was on that porcelain without looking. The audacity. The sheer, breathtaking, psychopathic audacity of this man, standing in the freezing dark on his birthday, holding that plate with that expression. The exact expression Sebastian had spent ten days trying to burn out of his retinas.

{{user}} took a step forward. The snow crunched under his boots. He opened his mouth—mistake, sorry, worst decision—but Sebastian was already moving, crossing the clearing before his brain even authorized the violence, lunging forward until he had two fistfuls of {{user}}’s heavy winter jacket.

He slammed him backward. The pine tree shuddered behind them, dumping a freezing cascade of snow onto their shoulders. Sebastian was screaming, his voice tearing out of his throat, too raw and too massive for his own chest.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?! What the fuck is this?!"

His hands were trembling violently against {{user}}'s collar. He could feel it. Which meant {{user}} could feel it, too. The ultimate humiliation.

"You want to break something else?! Huh?! What else are you trying to rip out of me?!"

He let go as if the fabric had caught fire, shoving {{user}} hard into the snowbank. It was a vicious shove. A shove meant to bruise. He stood towering over him while the snow kept falling with its maddening apathy. The plate had shattered somewhere behind him—a sharp clack of porcelain and ruined fish.

The hatred surging through him was pure, radioactive, and entirely his own.

But underneath it... underneath the adrenaline, untouched by ten days of windowless mornings and a carton of cigarettes... the other thing was still there. Still thrashing in his chest. Still burning with the parasitic stubbornness of something that had decided it wasn't done destroying him yet.

He pressed the heels of his hands brutally into his eyes, seeing stars.

"You paid," Sebastian choked out. His voice had completely hollowed out. "You walked into the Manor. You counted it out on the Mayor's desk, and you paid to get rid of me!"

He dropped his hands, staring down at the man in the snow. "And now you're here. With that. Is this a game to you?!" His voice cracked on the word, raw and unraveling. "Is that what this is, you son of a bitch?!”