Even when the tears dried, he didn’t move. He could feel Nikolai’s cheek pressed to his back between the shoulderblades, and his weight felt good against the spine. It didn’t even feel gross with all the sweat. The boy wasn’t stepping back, and Robert wasn’t going to ask him to.

“What does it feel like to grieve?” Nikolai whispered a few minutes later.

Robert sat up a little bit straighter but not too much as not to scare him away. “That’s a weird question.”

“Sorry.”

A pause.

“It feels like shit.” Robert muttered, feeling guilty. “Like as if someone poured smashed glass into your lungs, and you are now expected to breathe it.”

Nikolai stayed silent for a little bit more. “I think there’s something wrong with me.” A giggle. “I guess it’s not a surprise.“

“Why?”

“I should be sad he died, right?”

“I am not sad, I’m fucking furious.” Robert rubbed at his eyes with his palms. “...Okay, both sad and furious.”

“I don’t feel anything?” Nikolai whispered. He sounded unsure, maybe hesitant to reveal this. “I should feel bad, but instead I think about how he was always mean to me and he wouldn’t be anymore. How he kept laughing at you and now he wouldn’t. How he kept calling me the name I hated and how he would lock me in our room during his time off so I wouldn’t wander the house when everyone else was out. And how there’s now nobody to pay for my dormitory at Base.”

“People grieve differently-” Robert straightened and turned around, his eyes growing wide. “Shit! I completely forgot about that!” 

Nikolai stepped back and shrugged. “It’s alright.”

“Do you know if he paid for the next semester in advance?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know. I doubt it. It’s okay.”

“How is that in any way okay?!” Robert got up and tugged at his short hair in frustration as he looked around the workshop. “That school was, like, your only chance to get out of this slump one day-”

“It doesn’t matter. I will be stamped.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” He couldn’t help it. He didn’t know how not to get angry about this. “Just because one stupid doctor-”

“It’s not just one doctor.”

“Who else? Who was threatening you with shit?!”

“Robert!” Rob looked up and met Nikolai’s intense gaze. He looked almost angry. “I will get stamped. And not just because of my diagnosis but also because I like guys.”

It felt as if someone smacked Robert over the back of his head with a construction board. “You what?”

“I like guys.” Nikolai shrugged and finally looked away as if he didn’t say anything important. Then added, casually. “I am deviant.”

Dumbfounded, Rob couldn’t find anything better to say than “How do you know?”

Nikolai blinked, frowned, then looked up at him again. “How do you know you like Anka? It’s the same.”

“I wanted to touch her boobs.”

“Ew. Maybe, not that kind of the same.”

“Did you even date a guy before?”

“Did you start liking girls only after you started dating one?” Nikolai glared, his posture getting guarded.

Robert shut up. He didn’t want to believe that. The weird brain-fucked boy from who knows where was actually deviant? That little kid who cried about being called a wrong name? Then again, he wasn’t that little anymore. He looked the same as the other teens his age and was acting normal most of the time. He spent a year on his own at a school in another town and nothing went tragically wrong. Maybe, if he said he liked guys…it was true?

“Shit,” Robert muttered to himself and looked at Nikolai again. “And you just…said it so easily.”

“Well, it’s true, so what’s wrong with it?”

A shiver ran up Robert’s spine. “Who else did you tell? Who knows?”

Nikolai’s expression turned unhappy. “Just some people from school.”

“Seriously?!”

“They are not even from Port! And it doesn’t matter, it’s not like I can go back there.”

“So, nobody in Port knows?”

Silence. Robert started feeling sick.

“Who?!”

Nikolai cast his gaze to the floor and tugged at the edge of his t-shirt. Barely audible, he whispered: “Ehud.”

Rob let out a smothered groan. “Are you even for real?! Why the fuck did you-”

Tears started running down Nikolai’s cheeks. “I told him how I feel. I told him I liked him.”

The anger popped like an air balloon. Robert tried to imagine what it must have felt like. How scary it must have been. Like, it took him so long to find courage to make a move on Dezzie and she immediately slapped him. He tried to imagine what would have happened if he did the same to, say, Gatien (like, just a random example)? Yeah, he would be lucky to only end up in hospital.

“And what did he say?” Robert pushed away the scary thoughts, though the dread of empathy stayed.

“He asked if I would give him a blowjob.” Nikolai sobbed and started shaking.

Fuck.

After hesitating for just a couple of seconds, Rob stepped forward and wrapped his hands around Nikolai, returning the comfort he gave him a few minutes earlier. The boy didn’t push him away and instead pressed his face to his shoulder, perhaps grateful.

“I…assume you didn’t want to do that.”

“No.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No.” Nikolai sniffled loudly. “He said some gross things. But then I left. We didn’t talk afterwards.”

“When did that happen?”

“At New Year’s. I was hacking into the Southern mine’s servers for him.”

Robert sighed. Part of him wanted to find Ehud and bash his head against the floor. But then he remembered already doing it once, and also hurting Anka just a couple of days ago. No, that would solve nothing. And it’s been half a year, maybe the jerk had already forgotten about this.

“Sorry, that was probably rough.” He mumbled. He had no idea how to comfort anyone in this situation. “I…could never understand what you found in that guy. Like, even as a friend.”

“He was so funny, and kind, and he treated me like I was just another boy and not some weird oddity the rest of you thought I was. He was always honest with me.”

“And then he was gross.”

“Yeah. It was honest, but not in a way I liked anymore.”

Robert nodded slowly. The hug was starting to get awkward but he didn’t want to break it in a bad way so as not to make Nikolai think he found him gross. It was still Nikolai, right? He wasn’t as deviant as those deviants he would read about online. “Explains why you’ve been so upset with me last year, heh.”

Nikolai stirred and stepped back, ending the hug. His eyes were still wet but he was no longer sobbing. He frowned. “Sure, but it wasn’t just that. It felt wrong. Because I knew you weren’t that kind of guy.”

“What kind of guy?” Rob tried to smile but sudden anxiety churned in his stomach.

“Violent. I knew you could be angry but that was because you were passionate about things you cared about and you had a big heart. So I didn’t understand why you hurt Ehud. I still don’t. But…maybe I understand that sometimes people lash out not because it is a conscious decision they make. It just…happens?”

Robert stood awkwardly for what felt like eternity and tried to find words to respond with. He realised he had never heard someone compliment him in such a sincere way before. Yeah, Gatien called him a ‘talented motherfucker’ a few days ago but that was delivered with a smirk. You were expected to give out compliments and wrap them in jokes and curses so as to not sound girly. Yet, Nikolai somehow managed to be absolutely genuine while not sounding less like a guy at all. He didn’t even sound that childish.

“Well… Thank you, I guess. For thinking that.”

“I still think so. Even if we are not friends anymore.”

“Are we not?” Robert smirked bitterly. “If you are stuck at Port again, I’m afraid you won’t be able to avoid me.”

Nikolai smiled gently. “I wouldn’t want to avoid you.”

“Alright.”

“Alright.”

With hands back in the pockets of his shorts, Robert rocked from heel to toe, aware that his face was starting to heat up for no reason whatsoever. Shit, this whole conversation was too much. He really needed something simple to busy himself with. Oh, like-

“I kind of vandalised the innards of the plane we found last summer, but Gatien and I did some work on the outside. It’s been abandoned for a while, but if you want to see…”

Nikolai’s eyes grew wide and he turned around in excitement, searching the dim space for the hint of the white hull. Robert smiled as he could feel his shoulders relaxing already and headed for the far side of the workshop. “Come on, I had to wrap it tightly to make sure it wouldn’t attract any attention from possible scavengers.”

The tarp was so old it started falling apart under his fingers when Rob pulled on it; it slid off smoothly from the old hull but caught on the still rough surface of the freshly welded-on wings. (Neither he, nor Gatien were sure how big the wings should be as they couldn’t find the exact model of the plane. But this was their best guess.) The tail wasn’t complete, mostly because the cabling had to be fully replaced and Robert was yet to find something suitable; maybe he didn’t need cables at all, he could just install servos for each control surface and change their position via comm; he didn’t have any servos or a control module. 

Nikolai squealed in delight and gave the plane’s nose a hug as if meeting an old friend. “It looks so cool! It’s almost complete!”

“Eh, there’s still much to do. Half the instruments are missing because I pulled them out while digging for the processor.” Robert grimaced. “I still have that processor and I made a backup of the instructions it held, but it would take time to put everything back in.”

“Can we do it?” Nikolai turned to look up at him. “Uhm… I don’t mean right now. But…some other time? I can help! I can sift through the back-up you made. I can look for basic instructions updates. I can make sure it will work with non-proprietary code.”

“Uhh…” It wasn’t like Robert didn’t like the idea. A year ago, if he wasn’t acting all stupid, it would have been a thing he would jump in excitement about. Even a week ago. But today… “I guess. If it’s something you wanna do, go for it.”

Nikolai’s face fell. “You don’t want to?...”

“I do.” Robert searched for words. “But I don’t think I’ll be able to. I have to work, I have to gain money. Natan has been fired and the attorney would bankrupt us if I don’t chip in.” He let out a bitter laugh. “It’s not even a chip in. I need to somehow bring in as many credits as Hershel used to get just so we can continue having food. Despite how attractive an idea of rebuilding a plane sounds, I can’t afford it anymore.”

One hand still on the hull, Nikolai frowned and pondered something. “I can also chip in?”

“Dude, it’s fine. You are fourteen, you are not expected to work.”

“I have 120 credits on me.”

Robert blinked. “You…what? Where did you get that?”

“There are people who want their code checked and modified or they need something written from scratch. It’s never something you would go to a specialised company for, and it’s not too much money… But I can try doing more?” He looked up to meet Robert’s gaze. Unsure. Vulnerable. “I never took too many tasks because there wasn’t much of a point. I only did what sounded fun. And I would spend the credits on software and books. But I could try doing more and give the credits to Auntie Golda. Or to you.”

An itch started at the back of Robert’s skull. A stupid hope that maybe, just maybe, their situation wasn’t as horrible as he imagined it to be an hour ago. “I mean… Any credits would help. If you feel like it…”

“I do! I will work hard! And then…” Nikolai licked his lips and looked back at the plane. “...and then maybe we can also fix this plane? One day? Not fast but…”

“Yeah. Not fast, but eventually. For sure.”