Archive of Our Own

Sean likes it when Namo sleeps over, but he tries not to let it happen too often.

He knows he’s an awful bed partner for one. He tosses and turns and clings and makes noises and, humiliatingly, cries sometimes. There’s no way she’s getting good sleep when she spends the night at his place.

Namo has always been so understanding about it, ever since the first day she stayed over. It was only a few months after Sean’s mom died, so he’d just haphazardly moved all his shit into Gumpa’s spare room at the garage. He was kind of embarrassed to show it to her then, when it was just a mattress on the floor with his clothes and books stacked in semi-organized piles everywhere. He only let her sleep over that night cause she was too drunk to get herself home safely. He tried to stay up the whole night, also frankly wasted but forcing his eyes open in the dark just thinking no, no, don’t fall asleep, you can’t stop the nightmare from coming and you can’t let this cute nice cool girl see that. He lost eventually though, exhaustion and alcohol pulling him under, and he woke up with tears all over his face, both of their skin gross and wet where his head had ended up resting on her shoulder. And she was so— cute and nice and cool about it. Just wiped them both down with a corner of sheet and aggressively shut down all of his attempts to say sorry about the whole thing and told him to sleep more. She came back with painkillers and water and coffee for both of them, which Sean felt doubly bad for because her hangover must have felt at least as disgusting as his did. They just kind of languished in bed together until he felt up to giving her a ride home. She leaned into his space a little and tucked her hair back behind her ear as she said goodbye and his heart skipped a beat, like whoa, was this going to turn into something?

He went home after that and thought about what it’d be like to kiss Namo— how she’d crawl into his lap and hold the back of his head while they made out, what the exact size and shape of her would feel like if he hugged her tight to his chest. He lay in bed hugging his pillow, hands itching to touch skin, turned-on but confused. Because he got low-key nauseous when his mind wandered to whatever might come after hooking up, the days and weeks extending past that first time, some kind of dread he didn’t want to look at squirming in his gut.

And that's the second reason he tries not to have her over all the time: he knows she'd still like it to turn into something. He knows everyone already thinks they’re dating. And he also knows he’s not cut out for that or ready for it or whatever. So. Best to cut down on these situations where he can feel her breath on his skin, and she's half-asleep, and he's wide awake, thinking about how everyone else he knows is at home with their families or their partners and they don't need him as much as he needs them. Like that's not how you avoid it turning into something. That's not how you convince yourself to not press a grateful little good-night kiss to her forehead.

If he were less selfish, less desperately lonely, less prone to drinking too much once he gets going, he’d have steered clear after that first time. But he likes her in his bed. He likes staying up late talking until they stop making sense, likes that she strokes his back to wake him up gently after nightmares, that a few times she's rocked him back and forth a little when he’s on the edge of falling back asleep. sometimes he feels inexplicably small in her arms.

She lets him feel big and steady too, other times, like he, in his barely-a-room in a garage, with his fucked-up head, has something to offer her— a place to go, dumb jokes that make her snort-laugh, beer and take-out when she lets him treat her, rides to wherever she needs to go. And touch, he can offer her those soothing touches back, he can throw his arm around her shoulder and feel tall, he can pet her hair, he can relish how she goes soft against him when he gently scratches her scalp.

He knows he’s not being smart about it, that he should stop flirting with her and touching her and letting her spend the night if he can’t stomach the thought of dating her properly. He stops himself from kissing her on the mouth and thinks it’s the best he can do.

Sometimes (when he’s lying in bed. next to his books. wanting to be touched. and Gumpa’s gone home. and he’s already kicked it with Namo once this week. and Yok is fucking busy, fuck him) he thinks about would it be so bad, really, to just ask Namo to be his girlfriend. He loves her. She’s a good and trustworthy person. She takes care of him, and she lets him take care of her, and it’s a good thing. He could maybe just pretend not to be so confused about all the other stuff, pretend not to feel that looming dread, if it would make her happy.

But what kind of a shitty gift would Sean be. As much as he loves Namo, he’d be horrible at being her boyfriend. If the grief and rage bleeding out sideways didn’t ruin everything first, she’d eventually grow to hate his guts for the fact that he’d started this wanting something from her, but not wanting her all the way. Not specifically her, and not like that. 

And he wouldn’t stick around for her. He won’t stop trying to take Tawi down, not for anything. There’s a good chance Sean’ll be dead or in prison before too long, and a lot of the time he looks forward to it all just—  stopping. soon. A lot of times he can’t muster much feeling about anything at all. Thinking about his future makes his blood itch, whether it’s with Namo or anyone else. Makes him want to burn shit down and just get it all over with faster.

He doesn't kiss her on the mouth, and he doesn't ask her to be his girlfriend, and it's the best he can do.

They’ve been hanging out for more than two years now, and neither of them has made a move. He wonders what's holding her back, too—  maybe she's as afraid as he is of losing a friend. Maybe she just knows too much now about what's wrong with him to want to go through with it anymore.

Everything is spinning out of control today, like it feels like it's been a month since this morning in Black's bed and a week since holding his father's picture up to Tawi's face in the fucking school bathroom of all places and then Gumpa's greeting him at the garage with leads, like pictures and addresses and Sean can't tell if this is the best or the worst timing possible. He doesn't know if Black's still tied up in his old bed and he doesn't know if he wants Black to have escaped yet or not.

He texts Namo.

Somehow, she finds him the perfect abandoned building near the warehouse without even asking what it's for— so he goes and looks at that instead of anything else. And of course she has to give him a Namo Art Talk about the spot she found— the familiarity of the interaction so weirdly comforting it feels like a new month has started.

She talks about this building like it's a rare treasure. She tells him how its style reveals the true nature of its materials as they're found in the world without trying to disguise them as something else. She kind of pets the wall as she talks about its beauty and strength.

Fuck, a part of him still wants to kiss her. He can feel that familiar pull drawing him into her personal space, the one that makes him want to bury his nose to her neck and smell her. It’s so— he can feel the difference firsthand now, between being involuntarily and hopelessly wrenched into love with someone, and this well of fondness, this desire for a formless closeness.

The wall is rough and cold where he traces her finger's path down the seam of concrete.

Namo stops touching the wall and touches Sean instead, resting her hand comfortably on his shoulder, leaving it there like it's easy. She tells Sean how she and her friends are going to cover these walls in art someday soon. He likes that idea.

He doesn't expect it to feel so much like cheating when things with Black turn actually real.

What would he even tell her— he never actually made the promises he's about to break.

It turns out that Sean and Black not in immediate danger of being assassinated and instead they’re kissing and flirting and walking out of the garage into the daylight. All in all, there are worse ways to come down off a bout of fearing for your life.

When Sean sees Namo out front his stomach drops. His hands start sweating and he doesn’t know what she saw but he knows he wants to run and hide.

He asks her why she’s there and now she maybe thinks he specifically doesn’t want her there, and then Black is leaving which is probably good because clearly Namo wants to talk but there is a small part of Sean that feels like it’s going to die every time Black leaves. He knows it’s stupid but he apparently has no object permanence and doesn’t fully believe he’ll ever see Black again. He can’t help but keep his eyes glued to him as he gets on his bike and rides away.

When he shifts his attention back to Namo, his hands curl up at his sides and he feels small in a bad way, like a kid who’s had his mistake called out in front of the whole class, like he can’t actually do anything to take care of her and never could.

She’s putting together the pieces. She’s asking about where he’s been all day, and who with, and why he hasn’t looked at his phone at all. "What's going on between you and Black? It's more than I see, right?"

He finds he’s relieved that she knows. He can just look her in the eyes and nod when she asks, and he doesn’t have to find the words to tell her. She knows him so well. She’s just barely not crying. It hurts to see her take steadying breaths, not totally able to stop her bottom lip from wobbling, and know that he’s made her feel this way. There’s something clean-feeling about having it out in the open though, clear in a way he’s never been with her.

Even now, she’s so generous with him— Sean knows she’s proud as hell and doesn’t want to show how much he’s hurt her, but when she wishes him good luck he can feel that she really does want him to be happy. He takes a steadying breath and tells her I’m sorry, and it’s the best he can do. Sean watches Namo speed-walking away so he doesn’t see her cry, and he hopes desperately that he didn’t just lose having her in his life.

Fuck. He hoped the next time they saw each other he’d be doing something low-key nice for Namo (but he hadn’t thought of exactly what). He hoped he’d be able to give her the chill, right amount of space (whatever that would be. certainly not this), to where things had settled a little, but she knew he really needed to still be friends. He’s ruining that now. Smash in case of emergency. He just drunkly ends up back at The Building, confused and heartbroken and mad as shit and generally feeling like someone’s read a list of his worst fears and made them come true because they thought it would be funny to watch him fall apart. Also, likely concussed. And like he said a few drinks in but he lost track of the bottle somewhere, forgot to bring it with him on the last leg of his walk to the building where everything happened.

He didn’t know that Namo’d be here, but when he saw the lamp’s light from the entrance and knew it had to be her, he just kept going in a straight line, didn’t even adjust his path to avoid kicking the paint can with his shuffling steps towards her.

Oh god, he feels like a kid in front of her again. Mom somebody hit me. Here’s where it hurts.

She calls him a fucking asshole. She gives him a hug that hurts but he leans into it, and when that starts a whole spiral again she forcibly un-crumples him from his new spot he finds on the floor with his head in his bloody hands. She gives him red paint and tells him to deal with it the same way she did when he hurt her.

She helps him think something else, something that isn’t oh fuck oh shit literally everyone hates me. When she reminds him she's mad at him she's also telling him she doesn’t hate him. She reminds him he has shit to do that isn’t just curling up and dying in the place where he first kissed Black.

When he looks at the heart she’s painted on top of his you’re heartless, how there’s a weird little creature jumping off his words, drawings dancing in-between and on top of his letters— it really looks like something cool that they made together. It occurs to him, with a huge wave of gratitude, that he’s one of the friends she was talking about when she said we’ll put art on the walls.

He can feel the sadness aching right there under all his cuts and contusions, it has its own physical place inside of him. But so does the warmth from the fact that even after he’s been such a jackass, she’s still willing to hold him, like she always has, just the way she found him.