It's like the world has been emptied of people, and all that's left is this little group of disparate souls, JC thinks. The camps were crowded. He grew up longing for space. The room he's living in now is larger than the room he shared with his entire family before he was moved to the working camp. This room is wallpapered with old newspapers, and pictures he carefully cuts out of magazines he finds in garbage cans.
He has a bed and a shelf made of bricks and boards. He has books and magazines. No one ever comes in here. There are never raids. He doesn't have a door, but the heavy blanket he's hung over the door opening is enough.
He has rose petals under his pillow. He pushes his hand under it and feels them, crushed and warm and a little crunchy around the edges already. Their scent is fading, but it still lingers in the bed.
He doesn't want to get up. The last time he felt this reluctant to wake up in the morning was just after they moved down here, and then Chris had been around to shake him out of it. Chris had trouble sleeping at all, and he could effectively keep JC awake. They'd fucked some, too, but stopped when JC met Lance. JC didn't think Chris was boyfriend material. That's changed, though, and now Chris has Justin, even though they're not actually doing anything yet. JC thinks Chris is waiting because he's afraid of fucking it up, because he thinks it's that important.
Of course, now Chris doesn't have Justin, and that thought gets JC out of bed, finally.
The tunnels are empty. He can walk around all day and not meet anyone. Most of the people have things to do, and hang out in the lower levels where Alex rules with an iron fist.
He turns a corner and walks into Chris.
"Fuck!" Chris mutters and rubs his side.
"Sorry," JC says. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing!" Chris throws out his hands, as if accusing the entire sewer system for this. "It's unnatural. I'm going nuts."
JC opens his mouth to say "it'll be okay," but maybe he's said that too many times already, so he closes it again.
Chris just glares at him. JC looks at the wall. There's a word freshly scratched into the concrete in large, jagged letters. FUCK. Oh, that's profound, JC thinks.
"Not a word, Chasez," Chris mutters. He's tense and jittery, and JC is worried, for a second, that he'll just let go and take a swing. At JC or the wall, or both.
"Is there anything I can do?" JC says.
"No," Chris says.
Later, he finds Joey and Baby in the common room, playing with dice on the rickety table. Baby's mostly trying to eat her dice, and Joey's patiently making her spit them out again.
"Hey," JC says.
"What's up?"
"Same old." He sits down next to Joey and looks at his hands. "Chris is a little..."
"Fucked up?" Joey quirks an eyebrow at him. "No shit."
"I wish--"
"There's nothing you can do, JC," Joey says and pats him on the shoulder.
He goes back to his room and lies on the bed. The picture next to his head is a panorama shot of a tropical beach: white as sun-bleached bone, the lagoon crystal-clear, glittering aqua, lightly topped with bubbly white where the waves break against barely submerged coral reefs. The jungle beyond the blinding white beach is a wall of lush, impenetrable green.
He looks away from it, stares at the ceiling, which is the same grey concrete as all the walls in all the tunnels for miles and miles around. He doesn't know how big the sewer system is; this is an old city, and the tunnels wind deeper and deeper in twisted, interlacing layers. Maybe Alex has a map.
JC has never gone exploring. Chris and Justin did, a couple of times: packed up backpacks with food and just went walking down a random hole, to return days later, dirty and exhausted and still laughing. They had stories to tell, stories about nothing, because nothing was all they found, nothing and more tunnels, but it was enough for them to be in each other's company.
He falls asleep and wakes hours later. He remembers dreaming about running through a Northern forest, stumbling over fallen branches, feeling twigs whip him in the face, but still running. He remembers not being afraid even though he was all alone.
His hand hurts, and for a second, the dream feels more real than the dank room around him. Then he realises he's scratched his hand on the rough concrete of the wall; there's a spatter of blood on the torn newspaper there. His other hand is in a tight fist under the pillow, crushing the dry rose petals into dust.
He's afraid now. He stumbles on his own feet when he gets up. His knuckles ache when he moves his hand. He hears footsteps outside his room.
He pulls the blanket aside so violently that it tears around the nail in one corner.
Chris stops and turns his head. JC shivers and reaches out. Chris has a backpack and his gun at his belt.
"Wait," JC says. "Wait."
"I can't," Chris says. His eyes are harder than JC's ever seen them before.
"Please," JC says and wraps his arms around Chris' neck, leans his head on Chris' shoulder. Chris is stiff and uninviting and seems to have stopped breathing. "I'll come with you tomorrow even if there's nothing," he says.
Chris relaxes so quickly it's like someone let the air out of him, and JC finds himself holding him up. JC thinks Chris might cry, but he doesn't. JC cries instead, with his face against Chris' neck. His scratched knuckles bleed on Chris' sweater.
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