#but javi is a brother before anything out there!! and seeing how relieved travis was just to have him back will never leave him ever ever

[enslaughts]

@doomdays. . . akilah.

' do whatever you have to do. '

most days, javi sleeps. they all do, but they don't all have a room to themselves, and even travis has taken to sleeping by the fire with the rest of them. they're too tired to do much else, too weak. too hungry. everything reeks of it ; starvation and fear, like saliva. sleeping, waking nightmares, one - sided conversations in the corners of the cabin, glazed over gazes stared at nothing. someone's going to die soon. shauna almost killed one of them with her own hands, bare and white to red - knuckled, wild, may yet still. javi doesn't want to eat lottie. he doesn't want to be like them, but someone's going to die soon, he knows this. dreams of it, over and over in the fine lines of the wood grain, memorized.

lately, though, he dreams of worse things. sunlight and stovetops. travis' eyes but older, taller, heavy. travis, younger, shorter, lighter. small smiles over a table and hot food in his mouth. when he wakes, the ring on his thumb feels too loose, too cold, like a piece of him's broken off. left hanging by a thread. when he wakes, there's water in his eyes and his mouth and what feels like his lungs, sputtered and wheezing out into the white, where it's too cold to feel. it should be, anyway. today, he's a prey animal, folded at the tree - line, the waist, sheer hunger, tucked away and hidden. he wants to leave. he wants to run again so bad he can taste it, frost turned to thaw in his mouth, sweet respite from the snow. he doesn't warm his hands in it, though— no, he presses them into the frozen ground until he can't feel them anymore.

only then does he notice akilah. flinches with his eyes and nothing else, hers almost black in the pre - dawn blue, but they're wide, imploring, and javi is too out in the open, too seen. for a moment, he's tucked in a darker, greener place, moonlight and fire, and it's shauna's black, black gaze boring into his. akilah opens her mouth and all javi hears is run. but he can't— i can't, he wants to say. needs to ; to her, to travis, they weren't like the others. alikah was just as hungry as the rest of them, but she was also good, and kind, not just to him, and he thinks he could trust her, but his lips are sealed and shaking, and he can only shake some more, his head, side to side, no. no. he won't leave travis. not again.