They walked back to the gate in a comfortable quiet, side by side, and climbed back over with little fanfare. No cars rumbled along the main road ahead of them and for the entire length of that quiet street, only two lights still winked at the night. Only at the end of the road where their ways would part did they pause.

Seemed like a goodbye - one that Casper was irritatingly reluctant to make - but before he could hastily get it done before he got maudlin about things, Cain asked if he could walk him home.

Casper probably only agreed because he said can, rather than make any implication about Casper’s ability to walk himself home, but ... stupid how hard that smile was to suppress as they started the walk, Cain swinging the Chinese bag by its handle and just ... just smiling. The whole damn time he didn’t stop looking like he didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.

How come he ever deserved that?

They got talking about books on the way back. Turned out Cain was just as much of a voracious scifi nerd as he was, even if he angled more to literature while Casper went to fantasy and horror.

They had so much common ground that it had to be fatemeeting like this. Just in the fifteen minutes, Casper agreed to lend him his favourite book that Cain had never read next time they met, and Cain promised to have at least mostly finished it by their next date.

They arranged that second one too, watching a film based on a book they both loved, but Cain stuck to whatever surprise he had planned for the first and that made Casper so stupid fuzzy warm that by the time they got to his rundown building and stopped outside the door, he had his scarf pulled up to his eyes to hide this stupid smile.

He hadn’t even meant to take the guy to his building. He just walked there, but at least he wouldn’t know which flat it was.

Cars roared past while they stood at the foot of the crumbling high-rise. A gang of kids all in tracksuits on stolen bikes hung out down the road. He knew those ones, the ginger and the skinhead and the really tall gangly one.

Jack caught them heckling once and even though it had been a long-standing thing of them heckling Casper and him selling them underweighed grams after heckling them back, he went off so hard the kids had been terrified of him since. Shame. They’d made him some good money.

There’d been a lock and a keypad on the door once, but it had broken before Casper had moved in and no one had ever fixed it, so if anyone ever wanted to walk into the lobby with its threadbare floral carpet and peeling wallpaper, they could. Casper had come back from work and found hobo’s sleeping down there more than once, and he usually gave them a cigarette if they were awake and wanted one. Least he could do seeing as he pretty much never had food.

What was Cain’s place like? Solid gold fucking doorknob, probably, but his lip didn’t curl, no judging glare at the plant pot overflowing with sodden cigarette butts beside them. Would he even show it if he was judging it? No way of knowing. No way of knowing with any of this, and it was so, so easy to fake.

There was a light above the door. A good bright one, and in that light, Casper got his best look at Cain’s face yet.

His eyes were the same nutty brown as an acorn, all full of deep amber rays.

At the obvious there’s no way I’m telling you which flat I’m in pause, Cain leant against the dirty white-washed wall and watched Casper with a soft smile on his lips.

“Dare I say I already can’t wait until I see you again?”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have. It was probably a lie anyway. Casper rolled his eyes and pretended to dig around in his pocket for a key. The tight aching muscles had persisted, and so had the shiver. Lethargy gripped hismind in its spectral claws. Sharp. His tongue felt inches from tumbling over the edge to some viciousness he only meant when he felt like this.

“Do you want to stay?”

Idiot.

“Do you actually want me to? And no is completely fine, Casper.”

Definitely not. But Cain questioning it brought him up short from insisting. “I...”

Cain’s fingers grazed his cheek. The scarred one, even though he had to reach across to it. “I’ll see you in then go home. I, ah—” He glanced down at his watch. “Ah, I have to be up in three hours. Lovely. And honestly, Cas ... I don’t think staying’s the best thing for—”

Casper snatched his hand up to his chest, stomach turning. The indigo haze of a storm brewed in the back of his mind. “Not the best thing? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh cock.” Cain’s face turned instantly contrite. “I mean me. I’d—”

“You mean you’re going to come up and fuck me and when you fucking leave, you’re gonna laugh and piss off when I inevitably ask for money, right? What else could I possibly want you to come up for, right?”

“No! Cas, I—no. I mean I won’t and like I’d just bloody leave if I did anyway and I’m—I can’t believe something likethis is actually happening to me and I don’t want to cock it up. I told you, Cas—” Cain stepped forward and cradled his jaw in his hands, shocking cold, so wrong with the passion lighting up his eyes, a strain in the panicked deluge of his words— “You’re something special. It’s—It’s fate, or something, but I’m—I—”

“Shut up!”

The river of his words stemmed at Casper’s rasp, and perhaps now those wide eyes took in how Casper’s face trembled. He wanted it to stop, for it to just do what he wanted and bare his teeth or spit on him or something, but he could barely stop it from crumbling entirely. Fuck, he needed to just tear away and stop looking at Cain’s fucking face, but his hands were like ice against the burns searing his mind.

So many things that bridled against his tongue, but in the end, only one mattered.

“I’m not special.”

He was roach boy. Nothing but filth.