Chapter Text
His disappointment at the realization that the footsteps approaching from behind him are not in fact his brother quickly morph into relief that it isn’t one of them, and then subsequent panic that it’s her.
Of course. Of course it’s her. She can never just let him push her away for both of their sakes. She just looks at him, alarmed, desperate. He feels like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
He scrambles to find something to say. “I can’t— I can’t find him.”
“He might be back at the cabin.”
That might be worse. “No. Something happened last night.”
Natalie moves ever closer, gentle, bracing like she’s trying to find the best angle to shoot from without scaring him away. “Then I’ll help you look.”
He feels cornered. Hunted. If it weren’t for the look on her face, naked with hurt and concern, he may have run again. Maybe he should have.
“I don’t want your help.” It’s the next best thing. It’s all he can think to say that is both mean enough to keep her away and true enough to prevent him doubling over with the weight of yet another untruth between them.
Tears well up in her eyes and Travis feels rotten, poisonous, “I know.”
The worst part is he knows she does. His throat aches with the lump he tries to push down, head throbbing with the threat of his own frustrated tears, “I don’t want your fucking help, Nat!” He tries to bark out, tries to make himself seem bigger than he is. Anything but this. Small and afraid and dirty.
She doesn’t even flinch. He wants to fall to the floor and let the leaves and the dirt swallow him whole. “I know,” she says again, quieter, somehow just as small as he feels.
It’s all catching up to him now. A freshly dug grave, blood and tears and vomit and rot. His last fight with Nat. Quiet, shameful pride. Javi, face fallen with childish hurt. Turning away from him and towards something much too big to ever turn back from again. On top of someone and he’s not really here, someone on top of him and he’s not really anywhere. Teeth and tongues and filth and fear, something on his throat, something in his throat, something spilling out of him and he can’t put it back in. Empty shells with nothing inside.
He feels like there’s something inside of him. Or maybe there was. Now he’s not so sure. Maybe it’s not that simple, he thinks; maybe it’s all give and take, and maybe he’d been too resistant to do either all this time, stubborn and ashamed and trying to hold onto things that were never really his while refusing all the things that could’ve been. But he thinks he understands now that It won’t wait for him. That It’ll get what It wants and give to him what he needs, the easy way or the hard way. Maybe Natalie knows that, too. Maybe she always did. Maybe she was trying to warn him.
Whatever’s left inside of him certainly feels like it’s trying to come out now. He can’t look her in the eye, tries to keep from sobbing and it comes out like a whine, like a little kid who’s spilled something and doesn’t know how to clean it up. “I’m so sorry.”
She reaches out for him. Stop fighting. He lets her.
Face buried in her shoulder, arms around each other in a desperate embrace, the words start to pour out of him like blood from an open wound, “I didn’t want to. I fucking love you, and I—” Her grip tightens, eliciting another sob, “I deserved it. What they did to me. I wish they had…”
The tap runs dry and all he can do is choke and sob. Natalie doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t want her to — too ashamed for either comfort or reproach to make any sort of difference in his tidal wave of humiliation. She holds him not only to keep him together, but seemingly as if to keep herself upright, and he realizes she’s standing on her toes so he can better cry into her shoulder. He can hear her quietly sniffle, trying to keep from breaking down along with him. She isn’t warm enough to stop the chill of what must be sometime in November, he thinks, from seeping into his bones, but she’s there. She’s real, and so is he, and that’s enough.
He gets the feeling it will only be temporary. For now, he doesn’t care. He lets her hold him until it’s too late and too cold to stay out any longer.