leaving you starving

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

n e m o

1.

His hand slips off the table, the movement wakes him.

He's slow in it, the coming to. Feels a little like falling. Then his eyes are open and Nemo's staring at a shaft of moonlight cutting across the kitchen table. His hand closes in a fist over the beam of light but he comes away with nothing, cold and empty.

"Oh," he murmurs.

His brow furrows, he pushes himself up and shakes off the last dregs of sleep, then winces and presses his palm into his shoulder. He fell asleep on a book again, he's been making a habit of that lately.

Nemo stands and swings his arms around, pacing and stretching as he waits.

Tate still isn't home.

That's normal. He works through most nights. That never used to be a problem because Nemo did too. Now, time melts like sinking ships.

His father died two months ago, then his mother three weeks later. After she got through the worst of the withdrawal symptoms, she took one look at Nemo and couldn't find her son past the scar on his face. Years of crippling morphling addiction made her fragile.

She stopped eating. He begged her to try but she couldn't.

Ken said it was the guilt.

It was stupid of him to think that there'd ever be a different outcome. Tate had tried to save him from the pain of it but Nemo was too stubborn to listen. He always was- Tate wasn't the first to try.

"You can cry," Tate had told him when Nemo came home that first night, a suitcase gripped in his hand with the last of his things from his childhood home. Nemo didn't though, not then and not a few days later at her funeral. He still hasn't, it feels like he's stuck two months back, when they were still alive and he could keep putting off grieving them, though he can feel something building.

He doesn't pursue it, just waits for it to come to a head.

He doesn't know what else to do and mainly because if Tate's not around, Nemo just lays there feeling out of place.

The Seraphim house is strange to him. There are touches left over from a mother that loved them, cobwebs that the brothers refuse to clear because they remind them of her, they miss her.

Herbs hang drying from the kitchen ceiling, tea leaves in the window, the walls lined with jars of different blends that Tate's made. There's one on the shelf with Nemo's name on it, a quiet sign that Tate loves him. Even now, when he turns his head, he can see it there, half-full. He never liked tea until he tasted it.

The house is warm in the winter. There's always food in the fridge. When everyone's home it's loud, but it's good, it's happy loud.

There's all this knowledge built up inside him, a set of rules he's written over the years on how to take up space. Noise was never a good thing growing up but silence was somehow worse, Nemo always tried to skate along some sort of middle ground.

When voices rise, Nemo shrinks, shoulders caving inwards in an attempt to make himself invisible. He positions himself near exits, presses his back to walls, one foot out the door.

Then Tate's arm loops around his waist, he pulls Nemo in against his side and he remembers that he's safe. Just one touch, the light feeling of his boyfriend's fingers against his scar, his breath on the back of his neck, a knowing smile and he's home.

The restlessness stays, in the same way that it always has. He's not good at being known like this, despite always secretly wanting to be. Nobody told him about the way that love can strip you down, exposing you to the core. His heart twists in ways it never did before he met Tate.

There's a precious, tight feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he looks at him. It's like cupping water in his hands. A quiet question, perched on the tip of his tongue, 'how long do I have until you slip through my fingers?'

He watches the small hand shift slowly onto the two.

Nemo gets up to put the kettle on. The wooden handle's well-worn, scratched up and splitting on the edges, a love language transcribed over time.

He doesn't miss his mother.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

n e m o

2.

At first, it’s bad.

He replays their last conversation in his head so many times that the words start to lose all meaning.

His suitcase just lays there on the floor for a solid month, still packed just in case he gets a knock at the door, maybe that knowing smile, ’I changed my mind.’

Weeks pass and it never happens.

On a Tuesday, he putts his socks in the dresser drawer. By Thursday, the suitcase stands empty in the closet.

Nemo buys a plant on his way home from work, puts it in the middle of the kitchen table. Then he changes his mind, he moves it to the windowsill.

The green of its stem makes him think of drying tea leaves, he moves it to the window beside the bed. It flourishes there, likes the morning sun better than the afternoon. He didn’t know that it could but it gives him these tiny little blue flowers.

In the summer, he goes to the square to buy peaches and sees Mason by the fountain. His hood is pulled up but Nemo knows the slope of his shoulders. He thinks about saying hello but only thinks it.

His palms feel raw, like he’s holding a handful of ice in them but there’s a warmth behind his eyes. He wants to ask about Tate.

It’s been a couple of weeks since he thought about him, it’s almost annoying how much it still stings now, like it’s all still fresh.

It’s pathetic, he knows that.

It doesn’t even change anything, some people are just not meant to be loved.

He feels the give of flesh.

Nemo looks down. He forgot about the peaches in his hands, little crescents of golden yellow seep juice onto his fingertips. He was going to savour them over a few days but now if he tries to keep them, they'll never last.

They both become dinner, sticky and warming as the sun slips behind Nine’s buildings.

Then he buries the pits beneath the blue flowers.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

n e m o

3.

He gets an apprenticeship with a mechanic that he met when he was younger. Nemo spent so many years running around Nine that there's very few people in his field that don't know him and despite all the trouble he caused, he's always had good base skills.

Mostly everyone else on his job sites are older than him, if he had to guess, close to how old his parents would be if they were still alive. He gets hazed for a little bit, used as a pack mule on most days, but his fingers are still nimble, his mind quick. He proves himself useful fast. The word 'apprentice' becomes just a title after the first few months and soon, Nemo's working with everyone else on near equal ground.

His hair still gets ruffled, they call him kid, but it's gentle. They see the cracks running from the corner of his mouth to the bottom of his eye and they decide that he doesn't need tough love.

Life feels like a dream that he can't wake up from. It's monotonous in its predictability. He works long hours, enough that he doesn't have time to do much outside of it. The job is exhausting, he inhales smoke, streaks engine oil across his skin and sometimes the machinery they work on is so loud that Nemo can still hear it ringing in his ears when he's trying to sleep.

At break, everyone eats together and he gets to know more about the other mechanics. They talk about their lives, about their kids and their hopes for them. Theane brings Nemo hand-me-downs from her son and Evan gives Nemo his kid's old textbooks because he catches Nemo reading an old medical journal one break.

He smiles for them all, cracks jokes like he's always done and fits himself into their lives as carefully as he can but it never feels quite right. He isn't always sad anymore, but he isn't happy either. He coasts along somewhere down the middle and tells himself that it's good enough.

"It isn't," Heath says.

"What? I work hard," Nemo says.

"Yeah kid, you're a hell of a mechanic but this isn't your place."

Nemo stares at him. Heath took him under his wing when there was nowhere else he could go. Not many people want to hire someone with his history, no one on the right side of the law at least. It's too much trouble, you never know what gang you might piss off.

"I do something wrong?" he asks after a moment. He looks calm but his voice is small; there's a strain to his tone, wire pulled tight across a hollow. "I can fix it, I-"

"Nah," Heath shakes his head, "Not a single thing since day one, that's what I'm saying Nemo, you're too good to waste away here with us."

"So you're firing me?"

"That's not what this is."

"You're firing me. Heath, I need to be here, I've got rent an-"

"Nemo, I knew someone like you once," the older mechanic cuts him off gently, "She went through the motions but her eyes were always far away. I ignored it, I hoped that would settle and when she tried to tell me about it, I shut her down."

"I don't know how this applies to you firing me."

"You're miserable kid, we can all see it and this time, I won't ignore it."

Nemo stares at him silently for a long moment. His shoulders sink slowly, wilting like the flower stems he hangs upside down above the kitchen sink, "You don't want me around?" he whispers.

"Kid, we'd keep you here forever if we could, but it's not right of us," Heath says, then he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a worn envelope. The edges are creased from folding around the object inside over and over again. "You've never told us much about you but we know you'd never be able to afford it on your own, so..." he passes it over to Nemo. "That should be enough to get you through a couple years of school."

"Why?" Nemo asks, eyes wide, "What do you want?"

"If life can be cruel for no reason, then it can be kind too," Heath nods.

"I can't ac-"

"You can," Heath says firmly, "Everyone chipped in, it's a gift."

"I..."

Heath says nothing for a long moment, neither does Nemo. They just stand there, arms crossed, not quite looking at each other. There should be a something other than bittersweet grief blooming from the back his throat, but there isn't. Part of Nemo still wants to argue about it but that's always been a piece of himself that he never could quite tame.

"It's just... not easy to... No one's ever..."

"I know, kid, it's okay," Heath reaches out and ruffles Nemo's hair, he tries to duck away but doesn't quite make it.

"Stubborn old man," Nemo says ruefully, then runs a hand through his hair to flatten it back into place. "Throwing your money away on an idiot kid."

"Stubborn kid," Heath says with a grin, then he hooks a thumb over his shoulder, "Come on then, one last lunch break."

Nemo's smile fades as Heath turns away. "Thank-you," he says softly.

He looks back down at the envelope in his hand.

It's more money than he's ever had at one time, even when he was holding warehouses ransom so he could get his parents their pills. He hasn't had to do that for a long time, but he still knows just how much morphling he can get with it just by the weight of the stack.

Sometimes he thinks about going back to see the house he grew up in.

Someone new moved in a couple weeks after Nemo left. It was a quick sale, he'd always just scraped by with the bills and the district took it back as soon as his mother's death was registered.

The new owner planted daffodils along the front walk and took the bars off of his bedroom window, made it into a real home. The first time he'd gone back, Nemo took one look and finally realised that he'd never really belonged there, he thought for one small moment that maybe he could here though.

It's a flatline of a feeling.

"Kid?"

"Right behind you," Nemo says.

He shoves the envelope into his back pocket, then runs to catch up.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

n e m o

4.

For a few weeks, it's bad again.

The flower dies. Nemo sees it coming this time, he watches it wilt in the windowsill. At first he doesn't understand why, he took care of it. He went to the library as soon as he noticed the leaves going brown and spent three days among the stacks, roaming here and there and making piles out of any tomb that seemed useful.

He made every remedy he could find, mixed growth elixirs and trimmed away any sign of rot but it did nothing. The leaves dipped downwards with each passing day, the edges curled inwards and browned, then crumbled into the dirt beneath them no matter what he tried.

So the flower dies.

He leaves it on the windowsill for too long. It stays there and shrivels up and offends him and Nemo wants to push it off the ledge just as much as he wants to hold the cool clay of its pot in his hands and will it back to life. He wants it out of his sight but can't bear to let it go. He takes a pair of scissors, cuts it down to the quick until only the stump of the plant he used to have remains. Even the inside is dead, pale, ghostly rings denoting its lifespan; short-lived.

His fingers dig beneath it, breaking through roots, moving so quickly, so frantic, that dirt spills out over the sides to land on the sill it sits on. The plant uproots easily, stiff spiderweb roots stick up in the air like a turtle on its back but Nemo keeps going. He pulls handfuls of dirt out and finds the skeletons of old blooms buried in layers of sediment until his nail beds are black.

Nemo goes still.

He pulls his hand back out in a fist. He'd forgotten. All that work to keep the stupid plant alive and the whole time, the answer was always there, he'd done this.

His fingers open slowly, shaking.

Two large seeds, paper skins withered, curling over points of rot as if to hide it. He forgot about the peaches, the ones he bought in the summer.

He'd eaten them both in one night, then buried the pits beneath the plant- Nemo did this. All this energy put into trying to save the damned plant but it was pointless from the start, he poisoned it, he did this.

He turns his hand, the seeds fall back into their grave.

Stupid. He should be used to loss by now, that he even still feels it anymore is so stupid.

The agony still sends him to his knees.

Strange. He laughs, split open.

Strange how grief stays.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

n e m o

5.

He never finished school.

There wasn't time when he was kid and all of his ideas were so large that they stopped fitting within the walls so he blew them out and then got kicked out. At the time, he didn't think he needed it anyway, no one where he was from ever even dreamed of a higher education, it was so out of reach.

When Heath gave Nemo that wad of cash, he didn't have the heart to tell him how useless it was. His educational record stopped abruptly in elementary.

He just slips it beneath a floorboard, then looks for another job and tries to forget about it. The hospital hires him as a janitor and it feels like a step below mechanic but rent still needs to get paid.

Like always, he picks up on things fast and fits himself in to daily workings smooth as a river stone. When he's cleaning the kid's ward, they shrink away from him. It doesn't hurt, little kids always get a little scared of the scar at first. Then one night, he brings a flashlight and tells them old stories. After that, the nurses start calling him Piper because of the way the kids scurry after him every time he comes through.

A doctor requests him in his ward because of the way he can make his patients smile. Another catches wind of this and every Thursday after, he's scheduled in hospice. He ends up in a different section every day of the week.

Slowly but surely, life softens again.

He signs up for adult upgrade courses at the high school and for the first time, doesn't feel like he's suffocating inside a classroom. They fasttrack him within a week, say he could have his diploma in a month at the rate he's going.

The guilt starts to lift.

Then one night, gang members flood emergency, there are so many that they run out of beds, then chairs. People lie on the ground and he has to step around them just to get through but Nemo always goes when they call a code orange, he has to check, to look for him.

As soon as he makes it through the doors, his mop is taken and they hand him gloves, thread, and a needle so sharp the end appears to simply fade out of existence. He steps back, hands shaking.

"I'm not-"

"See one, do one, teach one," says a nurse.

"I'm a janitor, Orville," he says.

"Then watch close."

He wants to shut his eyes and turn away but he doesn't. For a moment, the hospital disappears. He's ten years old again, sitting in the cold glow of a staticky television, watching his parents use. He never liked needles, then one night, he got stuck by one and it grew beyond that. He's terrified of them.

"Got it?" he asks sharply.

"Yes," Nemo says.

Cold steel in his fingers, the patient's skin hot and aching beneath his closed fist, it's brutal how slow he is at it at first. The kid hisses softly each time he starts the next stitch. Then he's done, the wound is closed. Another nurse kneels beside him, "Watch," she commands as she presses a bandage over Nemo's work and deftly wraps it.

"He gonna be okay?"

"For now. Next one's over there."

"I'm not allow-"

"You think that matters to them?" she asks, then sweeps her hand across the room's horizon, "They need us, Nemo."

She hands him a new needle in a plastic package, then shoves a handful of them into his pocket.

"Keep going, don't stop until I tell you."

She never tells him.

So he never does.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

n e m o

6.

"Hey Sean."

He slaps the folder against the stone and sits down.

There's moss growing in the letters of his name. It's been a moment.

"I finished. Got the paper and everything yesterday, I get to work unsupervised now." He pauses to open the folder and show off the diploma slid in behind a window cut out. "Ta da."

Somewhere to his left, a bird calls.

Nemo scoots a little closer and starts to carefully pull the moss away from the grooves in his brother's gravestone. He'd let it stay, Sean probably doesn't mind it, but he can't really afford to replace it after the moss erodes the stone, and people have to be able to read it. It has to be written somewhere that he lived.

"I'm older than you now," he whispers it like it's a secret, "Strange right? Guess I'm the big brother." He sits back on his heels and scans the stone to make sure that he got it all. His mother and father lie under a shared headstone to the right of him. Knowing what he does now, he can guess where they're at in their decomposition process.

The image of it is intrusive but natural after five years of school.

And it doesn't even hurt like it should.

"I had to learn some latin," he says, and turns his gaze back to Sean, "My name, Nemo, it means 'nobody'. Ironic, right?" he smiles. "I don't think mom and dad knew."

His smile fades a little.

"I can't remember what you look like anymore."

His jaw tightens as he looks down at the diploma between them. There's a good number of things that he can't really recall from his childhood. Nemo spent so many hours with his nose in medical books these past few years that he half-convinced himself it was some sort of degenerative disease.

Then the hospital psychologist diagnosed him with complex trauma and told him it was normal to have large memory gaps. He refused medication, just does the exercises and sometimes he gets slivers of things back.

"I wanted to pretend you were in the crowd watching yesterday but I couldn't," Nemo says. His voice cracks the littlest bit, grief always trying to slip through. He pulls it back, purses his lips and picks at the grass beside his knee.

It's unlocked new fears, like what if he starts to forget other things? Other people?

"Accidentally went on a date last week," he announces. Nemo had misunderstood a classmate badly. He'd thought everyone was going out for drinks to celebrate graduation, he'd been wrong. It'd just been Threya waiting for him at their usual table. "I know how pathetic this sounds, but I think I'm probably just not cut out for other people."

He can keep them all at arm's length, can keep them all laughing when they're in a group, but there's a silence in him that's become overgrown in the last few years. He used to hate being alone, all that ever did was let the noise in his head expand and become the only thing that he could hear. These days it's a herculean task for him to make plans with anyone.

School and work is a good excuse.

It's easier being alone, small talk is confusing and anything past that becomes walking on thin ice fast. It didn't take long for Nemo to realise that his life has been pretty different from most of the people he's around now.

Nemo knows that his childhood was shit, he doesn't need people to look at him like that. Where he came from, everyone had a hard time. Now he knows people that grew up with two parents and three meals a day.

He can't relate to that.

"Or maybe I'm just a one and done type of guy, which is unfortunate," he says softly, "Because I don't think he feels the same."

"It's been six years, Nemo."

Nemo stands then, as if Sean's response could be left behind and his answering voice isn't just a runoff stream from his own mind.

He's already thought about this a lot. There are so many stories out there where the happy ever after only comes when the characters end up together but life isn't like that. You can love someone and let them go, sometimes people end up alone and that doesn't make their story sad.

"But I have my own place, lots of windows, lots of light. I was thinking about getting a cat, I wanted a puppy but I work long hours at the hospital, it wouldn't be fair," he says, "And I'm happier than I used to be, Sean."

He picks up the diploma and tucks it under his arm.

"And you don't need to worry about me anymore."

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

n e m o

7.

He doesn't have a lot of free time these days. Shift work is brutal on the body, long hours and most of his time spent on his feet leaves him sleeping where he stands sometimes but there's a coffee pot in the nurse's lounge and as the weeks pass, he adapts.

Sometimes he picks up an extra shift here and there, but there's not enough time to go home in-between. Instead he'll find a horizontal surface and get in what he sleep he can, or he'll take himself for walks down the streets nearby.

Nemo's always liked the district best in that space between two and six in the morning, when the moon is still out and the sky slowly grows lighter. As a bonus, he's found that when he's in his scrubs, he doesn't really have to worry about what might happen to him. No matter what territory he slips into, the hospital is a safe zone and his uniform is the only armour he needs.

Sometimes on these walks, he'll run into trouble. The sound of a gunshot, shouting in the distance, he still remembers both of these vividly from his teenaged years. Instead of walking in the opposite direction, he'll go towards it. He carries a medical kit with him now, ever since that first week when he found a girl bleeding out and he couldn't save her.

And he'll walk onto battlefields too fresh to be touched or slip down dark alleyways no one else he works with would dare walk but he knows too well. He gets threatened, knives waved in his face weakly from men and women who shouldn't have the strength left to stand but it doesn't slow him.

His old belt he used to use to carry bombs gains a new life, leather loops hold scissors and a knife, the pouch carries needle, thread and cleaning wipes. Strapped around a thigh is his old knife, not that he'd ever use it. People don't know that though, stories fester around it. Sometimes people are too far gone to save with medicine.

He earns a name on the street, a simple title, the medic. It's whispered with as much gravitas as one would give the bogey man. To most, he's a light in the dark but to the select few, he's a thorn in their side. Carefully planned ambushes undone in moments by a boy with a roll of bandages, it's more than enough to earn him enemies.

It doesn't slow him, that possibility.

Killing a nurse is suicide, everyone knows that. It's one of those unspoken things. The hospital will never refuse a patient but good luck getting near it after that. Nine's streets have their own laws, it's a break it, you buy it sort of deal.

If the worst they can do is hurt him, one look at his face, at the scar that runs from his eye down to his mouth to give him a permanent smirk says it all. Nemo knows pain, it was never enough to make him run before, it isn't now and no matter how much things change, at his core he's still that same stubborn boy that never knew when to give up.

Self-preservation has never been his strong suit, years of playing Robin Hood is evidence enough. He goes through the slums every other week, makes sure Old Nel, who he swore was a hundred when he was a kid is still kicking. He delivers medication, checks bandages, and laughs about the old days with Gary, who's sober now and grows carrots, "Good for the eyes."

This is what he was always meant to do, Nemo knows that.

He smiles a lot more these days than he has in a long time but there's still a dull ache of embers burning beneath his ribs. It never fully leaves him no matter what he does or where he goes; he'll probably always just be a little bit sad.

And it's alright.

That's just how some stories end.