Re: [#19]: Liam & Seven
Heaving breaths didn’t make for the most calming effect, and neither did the dampening spread of dew against the knees of Seven’s jeans as he knelt in the grass and bowed under the solid weight atop his shoulders like Atlas and his globe - but it was the latter that cut through his panic with the most clarity, that cool moisture seeping into denim and staining his skin like Rorschach’s ink. And then it was helped along by the layers of Liam’s voice with words he could finally grasp, fear cut through with determination and something that sounded like worry for Seven.
That was what did it, finally hauled him to his feet along with the tight grasp of Liam’s slender hands wrapped around his bicep and digging in with a ferocity that hurt in a much different way than the clinging of claws or air knocked out of his lungs: Liam, sounding worried. Concerned, even. For Seven, not just himself. Strange and foreign not because Liam had ever been generally unconcerned, just that it’d been… years, that he’d gone without hearing those notes in the cadence of that voice he often still heard in his dreams.
On his feet, then, still unsteady and feet occasionally slipping against slick grass as they started to move, but they were moving. Flashlights lost somewhere along with any knowledge of where they were in relation to the starting area so that it was just pitch black and unfamiliar around them, but Liam’s hand was still clamped to his arm like a vice, and then his back under Seven’s outstretched hand as he reached to find him in the dark. Fingers twisting into the material of Liam’s sweater like a lifeline. Moving, running, following wherever the other man led him through the night.