byrn: <user name=bangparty> | pls dnt (ɢᴀᴢᴇ.)
naтнan вyrn ([personal profile] byrn) wrote 2018-01-12 01:26 am (UTC)

for gabriel | reunion

[ nathan is in a forest.

he doesn't need the wolf's nose or the falcon's eyes to know it's not his forest, it's not wales. maybe it has to do with the essence and maybe it doesn't—maybe he's simply spent so much of his life dreaming of wales that anything other is wrong—but he can sense that the earth under his feet is not the kind he knows.

survival instincts kick in after a long minute of peering through the trees, rising without hesitation from what has been weeks of trying to let them settle. he listens for the hiss of mobile phones and crouches low to look for evidence of life in the brush and leaves. there's nothing to find, though—the wilderness around him is still in a way he's never seen.

for a moment, nathan considers waiting. if he stays where he is and makes camp, then he has a better chance of being found. but it was hard enough to sit and wait in the middle of nowhere when he knew someone was coming for him. wherever he is, there's no one searching this time. no one good, at least. he has to move. strategy, no matter how shaky, is the only way he'll soothe the rising panic in his chest.

he tries to keep track of his surroundings as he goes, plotting out the positions of memorable trees and berry bushes and other landmarks, drawing a map in his head. he considers going invisible, but the need is not persistent. he can't help but notice the lack of threat here even when all of it is unfamiliar, though he can't let that hamper his judgement. he couldn't if he wanted to.

when he hears the sound of a branch snapping, he turns, knees bent, ready to dip low into the foliage and let himself disappear. but it's not a stranger. it's not an animal, either.

it's gabriel.

nathan's heart leaps to his throat, already thudding enough to ache, and he has to bar his mind from the onslaught of thoughts that rises up just at the sight of gabriel's face even from this distance, the fall and sweep of his hair, the set of his shoulders as he steps between two pines, back-dropped by green. nathan knows that it isn't real. he knows—he knows now—that gabriel doesn't exist like this outside of his head. he knows he isn't supposed to let himself wander into thoughts like these after so long of drifting somewhere between real and false, the harsh reality and a dream. because he knows gabriel is dead, buried in a grave that nathan dug himself.

he's excruciatingly aware of the truth, which doesn't explain why the vision of gabriel still remains in startling clarity. and nathan shouldn't reach out—he's experienced the sharp bite of that disappointment too many times before—but he can't quite himself from it. there's no one around to hear him talking to himself, anyway. no arran to worry. and he thinks that it might feel good after so long to just— just let himself pretend for a second. something buckles inside him, from fear or elation or some strange concoction of the two.

he presses forward, fingers dragging along the rough bark of trees as he slips between them, gaze locked on gabriel's back as he continues in the other direction, fading light touching him in all the ways it should, in all the ways nathan's mind couldn't quite make line up on its own.
]

Gabriel? [ he calls, his voice raw and harsh in the overwhelming hush of the woods but determined none the less. he can't help it, he has to try, he wants something more than what's left ] Gabriel, prove it's you.

[ prove he's not a hunter, prove he's not a delusion of desperation.

hope is not a thing nathan byrn has always had a lot of, but somehow, because it's gabriel, he clutches at the last thread.
]

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