The single bed was far less cramped now that Miles had got up to finish packing. Riven stretched out, putting his hands behind his head and watched the other boy as he shoved things in bags, muttering under his breath. Miles was stressed, trying not to forget any of his belongings while simultaneously going over the briefing he'd been given for his new job.

Riven supposed that this wasn't the graduation that Miles had been expecting. Then again, it hadn't been the year anyone had been expecting.

Miles bent over to pick up his jeans from the floor and checked the pockets for his wallet and shuttle ticket. He was fussing. Riven could recognise his flustered face easily now and he knew it was because of the draconian customs rules that were still in place after the Trix's rampage.

He'd had that expression after the first time that Riven had kissed him, his eyes wide and his jaw slack. There had been a moment of shocked silence, their faces barely an inch apart, before Miles had kissed him again. They had locked together, pressing up close, for a long time until they had heard someone open a door somewhere down the corridor. Riven had only done it to shut him up... well, mostly. He'd also done it because he had wanted to know what it would feel like after all the times Miles had blown kisses at him.

That wasn't the only time they had made out. It kept happening whenever they were alone, and then at some point kissing had turned into giving Miles head. Riven still wasn't sure how exactly that had happened. Only that one minute he had had his tongue in Miles's mouth, and the next he had had his tongue on Miles's cock. Miles hadn't stopped him, and even indulged Riven's gesticulated demands for his hair to be pulled and his head to be pushed down. Those requests had been the most they'd ever communicated about it.

Riven sat up on the bed and Miles paused his frantic fussing to look at him.

"You put your wallet in your satchel," he said, pointing to the bag at the foot of the bed.

"And you didn't say anything sooner because…?" He asked and Riven just shrugged; it wasn't his job to keep Miles organised. "Because you just felt like being an asshole? Right, okay."

"Yeah, I guess." Riven picked up his own clothes so that he could get dressed too. He knew he was being a dick, but he was walking the guy to the shuttle and that was about as much decency as Riven could muster.

He pulled his shirt over his head only to see Miles grinning at him when his vision was clear again.

"What?"

"You still have cum on your face."

Riven flinched a little as Miles wiped it off his cheek with a thumb, frowning angrily at the touch. Sex was one thing; sucking on another guy's dick while jerking off was completely different to gentle touches and strokes on the cheek. He didn't know where to look when Miles made contact like this. The affection was… unwanted.

Riven brushed his hand away and he pretended that he couldn't see Miles' disappointed face. It wasn't like they were in an actual relationship, they were barely even fuck buddies. So Riven didn't understand why he was always so crushed by the callousness.

"We need to leave soon if you're gonna make it on time, right?" He said before Miles could bring up Riven's obvious dislike of affection again.

"Yeah, hang on a moment." Miles hastily finished getting dressed and grabbed his bags. Most of his stuff had already been sent ahead so there was only a satchel and two gym bags to carry to the shuttle terminal. Riven carried both of the gym bags in case Miles got any ideas about trying to hold hands.

It was a half hour walk from where they were staying to the terminal. Normally, it was the kind of journey they would have made on the bus or in a taxi, but public transport was no longer running due to hazardous driving conditions brought about by the sheer amount of rubble and debris that had yet to be cleared, and the taxi services had been co-opted by the government for all the important business that the new council needed to do. So they were walking the whole way to the shuttle terminal. The city was healing after the Army of Decay's invasion but it was slow going. Even months after most people were heavily relying on aid packages dropped from the orbiting blockade.

They walked in silence through the ruined streets, sometimes picking through shattered glass and shards of concrete. Magix looked more like the back end of Zenith where Riven had grown up than the so-called centre of the magical universe.

Eventually they fell in behind a couple, a man and a woman, who were walking slowly enough that Miles huffed and his face soured. Riven was less bothered by their reduced pace than by how sickeningly sweet the couple in front were being with each other. Touches and kisses and all the things he was only okay with during sex were being exchanged publically, and the fact of how much he actually wanted to do that with Miles made him want to die.

It wasn't fair that he was so repulsed by something he craved. Riven turned his eyes to the demolished shops that they were passing rather than looking at the affectionate couple in front, or Miles to his right. Some things were best just not thought about.

They queued up in the terminal, waiting until the right shuttle was called so that Miles could go through customs and be on his way. Riven didn't feel like talking, and Miles could tell. So instead they just watched the news on the TVs in the waiting room. The audio couldn't be made out over the noise of everyone milling about and passing through so Riven just read the subtitles.

The main story was the rebuilding of the city. The two anchors discussed which businesses were reopening as well as the bouts of unrest that were springing up in reaction to some unpopular decision made by city hall. There would be an election cycle starting in a few months but the people were already making their displeasure known.

None of it was particularly riveting, nevertheless Riven pretended to be fascinated by it so that he could avoid actually talking to Miles. He was going to miss having him around, but he had absolutely no way of expressing that.

The male anchor introduced the next story and all of a sudden Riven no longer had to feign interest.

A body had been found dumped behind an abandoned shop late last night. The police weren't releasing much information, just that it was thought to be a mugging gone wrong and that the time of death was somewhere around midnight the previous night. There weren't any pictures shown - the police had been able to close off the crime scene promptly, so there wasn't much for the news to fixated on. The anchors moved on once more and Riven was left thinking.

The crimescene wasn't that far from where he was staying, it was entirely possible that he'd been awake and nearby when the murder happened. His sweet old landlady was going to be distraught at the news. He'd been enjoying being able to leave via the fire escape whenever he felt like it, and she might quite reasonably ask him to stop doing that.

The likelihood of the perpetrator getting caught was low; many of the city's police had been killed by the Army of Decay and those that were left were stretched thin. Magix PD had help from the Solarian and Eraklyon occupying forces but they were here to keep the peace, not solve crimes. He couldn't imagine having foreign soldiers prowling around interrogating people would help the unrest.

Honestly, if Riven had wanted to murder anyone, now would be an excellent time.

"That's my shuttle." He was startled out of his consideration of homicide by Miles standing up and putting his hand out for his luggage.

"Oh, right."

There was a knot in Riven's stomach as he handed over the bags he'd been carrying. He purposefully hadn't been thinking about this moment and now that it was here he didn't know how to describe what he felt. Just… uncomfortable and unhappy.

Riven's fingers hesitated over Miles' hand as the bags were exchanged. He was starting to wish that he had let Miles be affectionate on the way over, maybe that way he wouldn't feel so empty now.

He must have let some of that show on his face because Miles reached out to cup his cheek with a small smile. Riven let him kiss him. Even now, when he was desperate for Miles not to go, he felt self-conscious kissing another guy. He was torn. He wanted Miles to know how grateful he was for how patient and non-judgmental the older boy had been with him, but there was still fear. A big part of Riven's mind was convinced that they'd pull away and he'd see someone from his hometown watching, ready to tell his father.

Miles pulled away but kept his hand on Riven's cheek.

"I know this wasn't anything serious," he said, his thumb rubbing over the slight stubble. "But I am going to miss you. I don't know if I helped at all with your figuring things out, but I hope you manage it."

Miles kissed him again, and this time Riven let go a little bit. He put an arm around him to hold them closer together as if that would stop him leaving. It was a shuttle terminal, he rationalised, everybody was saying goodbye to friends, partners, and loved ones. The two of them kissing wasn't strange and no one would care. He hoped.

"I need to get going," Miles said apologetically when they separated.

"Yeah, of course." Riven let him go and watched him move towards the right line, his heart beat faster as he called out after him. "You did, by the way."

"Huh?"

"Help. You helped a lot. I'll miss you too."

Riven thought about how weak that had sounded as he wandered aimlessly out of the shuttle terminal. He was glad that Miles had been in a hurry or he might have died of embarrassment. What had he been thinking, saying something like that? But he did also think a lot about the smile on Miles' face after he said it.

He was at a loss for what to do now. He didn't feel like going back to his room, and he wasn't needed for cleanup duty. The pay for helping out the city while being forced to stay on planet was pretty good all things considered, even if the work was monotonous. None of his friends were still here wither. Well Timmy was, but he was all the way across the planet fretting about Tecna's facial reconstruction surgery, and Riven didn't feel like travelling for a full day just to watch him have a guilt-induced nervous breakdown.

So instead he loitered about the city and tried to find out as much as he could about the murder from the news. Fixating on death was preferable to thinking about Miles.

There was more information on a few online news outlets; the victim had been identified as a local man, Rusty Solis, and it was theorised that he had been coming home from his job as a courier when he was attacked. Riven scrolled through several pages before he found out the cause of death. Magix had some weird laws that mandated that any deaths had to be announced within forty-eight hours of discovery. Not just that, but also the cause of death too. It meant nonsensical obituaries and corrections to previous obituaries pervaded every news organisation.

In this case it had been a stabbing. Quite an extreme one at that. twenty-seven wounds in his chest. Riven grimaced at the mental image that phrase created. And all of this over the guy's wallet.

He didn't know why he was going down this rabbit hole. It wasn't like it was even a good distraction from pining over Miles, and he couldn't exactly do anything about it now. So he was just inflicting violent imagery on himself and still failing to distract from how alone he was feeling. And it didn't help that Miles had been his distraction from Darcy.

That relationship was definitely over. They had never 'officially' broken up, but it probably wasn't possible to come back from shooting her out of the sky with an arrow. Despite that though, he still felt the urge to visit her at Light Rock. It was a terrible idea. He couldn't imagine a scenario where that would work out well, and yet he desperately wanted to know that she was okay.

Riven put his phone away and kept wandering, although this time with a bit more purpose. What he really wanted was a drink. Probably something stronger than beer too. He wanted to get drunk enough that he couldn't form a coherent thought, let alone contemplate Miles or Darcy. It was getting to the early evening, so it was moderately acceptable to start getting wasted now.

Ideally, he'd scratch this itch by visiting an off license with the ID that said he was twenty and buying a bottle of something clear and foul tasting to take back to his room for the evening. But he was staying in the spare room of a lovely old lady and Riven baulked at the idea of possibly getting her in trouble for his underage drinking. She kept making him meals and telling him how much she liked having him around now that her kids had left.

That and drinking alone in his room sounded a lot like something his father would do.

No, instead he was going to see if any of the bars that had reopened took his fancy. It was past six o'clock which meant they'd be opening soon and he'd be able to get hammered; so he did a circuit around the four clubs that he knew were still operating.

The Mixing House would have been his first choice; it was reasonably close to his housing for stumbling-to-bed purposes, but when he approached he could already see some of the Cloud Tower seniors through the window and he turned on his heel to walk away before any of them caught a glimpse of him.

There was Bounce, which was filled with so many of his peers that there was no way the bartender would be giving out drinks to anyone who looked remotely under twenty, regardless of IDs. The next option was Jack's, but that was filled with the older crowd and definitely would have off-duty cops in it. And finally there was that dive bar. It had changed its name several times as it exchanged owners and Riven wasn't really sure what it was called now, just that he would definitely be offered crack if he went in there.

Those were his options, and he kept walking as he considered each of them. None of them were particularly appealing, and he was debating just going home to just jerk off and watch shitty tv when a sign further down the street caught his eye.

'Come in!' The arrow shaped sign said in glittered green writing and 'We were open in the riots, we're open now!' underneath in smaller writing

Riven walked towards where it was pointing and saw that, tucked away just around the alley was a door painted in the same green glitter as the sign, propped open by a pile of bricks. Above it were the words 'Happy Bar'. He only vaguely knew about the riots in the city from fifteen years ago so he didn't get the reference, but it was a bar and it was open.

He approached the open door and made eye contact with the bouncer waiting just inside. The man was large. He looked like he might be able to last a few rounds with Haikman in a fight, but he smiled as Riven reached him.

"ID?" The bouncer asked and Riven handed it over. "Do you need a visitor's badge?"

"'A visitor's badge?'" For a moment he thought that he'd been busted and he was about to lose an expensive piece of forgery, but then the bouncer handed him the ID back and laughed.

"If you're straight you have to wear a visitor's badge."

Oh. This was a gay bar. Riven was taken aback but surprisingly not put off from entering. He shook his head.

"No, I won't be needing one. I'm not straight."

That was the first time he's said that out loud. Possibly even the first time he'd consciously thought it. And the first person who'd heard him say it was a bouncer at a gay bar that he'd never been to before.

Fuck. What was happening to him?