Chapter 3: The First Night
The matchbox apartment, for all its drilled ventilation holes and soft cloth lining, was a terrible place to sleep. Renae lay on his back, staring up at the underside of the lid, which Mattius had propped open with a toothpick. The world was a symphony of giants.
The house groaned around him. Every settling timber was a cannon report. The furnace in the basement kicked on, and the rush of air through the vents became a distant, roaring wind tunnel. A floorboard creaked down the hall, and it sounded like the snapping of a great bone.
He was exhaustingly aware of the edge. Six inches to his left was the sheer drop from the nightstand to the carpet, a fall that would be like leaping from a three-story building. He’d curled himself into the very center of the cloth, but the sense of precarious exposure was paralyzing. He missed the solid, enveloping weight of his own duvet. He missed the simple, unthinking safety of a room that wasn’t actively, sonically trying to convince him of his own fragility.
He heard the rustle of sheets from Mattius’s bed, a continent away on the other side of the room.
“You’re awake,” Mattius’s voice came, low and soft through the dark. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.” Renae’s own voice was tiny in the vastness. He didn’t bother to elaborate. The hum of the house said enough.
More rustling. A click, and the warm, low glow of Mattius’s bedside lamp painted the room in long, deep shadows. The giant shape of him sat up, silhouetted against the light. Renae watched him swing his legs out of bed and pad quietly across the floor. His steps were earthquakes, but deliberately softened.
His face appeared over the edge of the nightstand, backlit by the lamp, his features softened by concern. “Can’t sleep?”
“The scenery’s a bit intense,” Renae said, forcing a dry tone. “And the acoustics in this boutique hotel are terrible. I can hear the pipes in the walls having an argument.”
Mattius’s lips quirked. He studied Renae, curled in the center of the matchbox. His eyes flicked to the perilous edge of the nightstand, then back. Understanding settled on his face, erasing the last traces of sleep.
Without a word, he slowly brought his hand down, palm open, laying it flat on the nightstand surface beside the matchbox. An invitation, just like before. His fingers were utterly still.
Renae didn’t hesitate. He stood, the microfiber cloth clinging to his boots for a second, and walked onto the increasingly familiar terrain of Mattius’s palm. The skin was warm, alive. Mattius lifted him, bringing him up through the lamplit air, not to eye level this time, but closer, turning his hand slightly so Renae could recline against his curled fingers.
Then he did something that stole the air from Renae’s tiny lungs.
He leaned back against his headboard, and with infinite care, brought his hand to rest against his own chest, just below his collarbone. He cupped his other hand loosely over the top, not as a cage, but as a sheltering dome. Renae was cradled in a warm, dark hollow, held securely against the steady, powerful drum of Mattius’s heartbeat.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
It was the most profound sound Renae had ever heard. It drowned out the groaning house, the roaring vents, the vast, empty dark. It was rhythm. It was life. It was Mattius.
The tension that had wired his every muscle for hours began to unspool. The warmth seeped through his clothes. The solidity of the chest behind him was a mountain no night sound could shake.
“Okay?” Mattius murmured. The word rumbled through him, a vibration Renae felt along his entire spine.
“Yeah,” Renae breathed, his voice muffled by the fabric of Mattius’s t-shirt. “This is… better acoustic design.”
He felt the low, silent chuckle more than heard it. Mattius didn’t reply. His thumb moved, just once, in a slow, sweeping stroke across the cotton-domed roof of his hands, a gesture of abstract comfort.
Renae let his head loll back. The heartbeat was a lullaby. The warmth was a drug. The scent of him—soldering flux, cheap soap, the unique, clean sweat of his skin—was the only geography that mattered. His eyes grew heavy. The fear of the edge, the terror of the scale, it all receded, pushed back by the undeniable, tactile reality of the man who held him.
He was asleep in minutes, a deep, dreamless plunge into trust.
Mattius did not sleep.
He remained propped against the headboard, the light from the lamp casting his and Renae’s joined shape against the wall—a giant guardian cradling a small, precious shadow. His arms began to ache from the stillness, but he didn’t move a millimeter. The weight in his hands was negligible, a few grams at most, and yet it anchored his entire soul to the bed.
He watched the slow, even rise and fall of Renae’s chest through the gap in his fingers. He counted the breaths. The trust was absolute, and it was a devastating, glorious weight.
This was his fault. His arrogance, his tinkering in forces he only half-understood, had reduced the most vibrant person he knew to a fragile piece of held memory. And yet, here Renae was, sleeping against his heart, cracking jokes about acoustics. The guilt was a cold stone in his own gut, but over it, warmer and brighter, spread a feeling so terrifyingly vast he had no name for it.
His thumb wanted to trace the line of Renae’s shoulder, to feel the reality of him. He didn’t dare. He just held the shape of his sleep.
The lamp grew a halo. The night deepened. His mind, usually a storm of calculations and circuit paths, was quiet, filled only with the twin rhythms: the heartbeat under his palm, and the slower, softer breath of the man sleeping because of him.
He thought of the two weeks. The German power supply was a lifeline, but it was also a clock. Fourteen days of this impossible, intimate custody. Fourteen days of keeping a five-inch-tall mechanic safe from a world of dust bunnies and dripping taps and house spiders. Fourteen days of conversations held in palms, of meals made from crumbs, of this.
His fingers tightened, just a fraction, a subconscious, protective squeeze.
Renae murmured something indecipherable in his sleep and shifted, nuzzling slightly deeper into the warmth.
Mattius’s breath caught. He held it until Renae’s breathing settled back into its slow pattern.
Tomorrow, he would start engineering solutions. A proper shelter. A transportation system. Communication protocols. A way for Renae to have some autonomy, some sliver of his old world back.
But tonight, there was only this: the quiet room, the glowing lamp, and the living, breathing secret resting safely in his hands. He would stay awake. He would stand guard. For as long as it took.