Sorry for the delay; I've been busy moving house and stuff. I know this chapter is short but the next one will be longer :)
Sebastian surveyed his fellow passengers in the departure lounge. They were mostly asleep. The strip lighting was harsh, and he wished he was outside. It was pitch black and still freezing, but he would rather lie on icy concrete than sit slumped in a rigid seat breathing the stale air of the airport. He was on the cheapest flight available back to his no-expense-spared school at 3am. Most of the people surrounding him were in creased suits, trying to get to some meeting, maybe home to their families. Sebastian winced at the thought of family. His head was pounding with the remains of the alcohol from the night before, so he took a deep breath and slouched further in the seat, letting his head fall back against the hard rim of the chair.
He wasn't new to airports. He didn't care that the cold metal dug into his neck. It was nothing he hadn't felt before. He closed his eyes for a second, but they flickered open again when he heard a soft voice, sweet and sleepy, simply letting out a small 'Mmmm'. He lifted his head up. That didn't sound like the people he normally had to fly with.
His eyes landed on a couple in front of him. There were two rows of empty seats between him and the young man and woman, but he had a clear view of them. He was in that certain state of fatigue where his eyes would land on something and refuse to move, but they were too oblivious to the world to notice. They weren't making any public displays of affection. They were barely moving. They were obviously broke, or they wouldn't have been on such an early flight (and they might have been in better clothes), but they didn't seem to mind. He was reading a book, probably one he'd read a dozen times before, with curled corners and brown pages, while she dozed on his shoulder. She wasn't even snuggling up to him particularly, just calmly leaning her head on him and holding his hand. Their fingers were only loosely intertwined, but they clearly weren't going to separate any time soon.
Sebastian noticed that the man was struggling to read. Not because he was tired, but because he only had one hand free, and he had to keep fumbling with his thumb and little finger to turn the pages, and every time he did the book would close or he would drop it, or come close to dropping it then save it at the last second. Every time he came to some place-losing disaster, he would look back to the woman to make sure she hadn't woken up. Sebastian couldn't help staring at them doing this little dance over and over, doing so much but barely doing anything.
He could have let go of her hand. He could have read his book like a normal human being and she would have been none the wiser. She still would have slept. He wouldn't have had to look back every two minutes to check that she was still asleep. Nothing would have changed between them.
Their relationship clearly didn't depend on this hand-holding; but it looked like he did. It didn't matter that he could have let go. He just didn't want to. He would put up with an hour of clumsy reading if it meant he could keep his fingers between hers.
Sebastian's mouth fell open. His eyes were stinging, and it wasn't because he hadn't slept in twenty hours or because there was a hangover clawing at the base of his skull. It was because he had let go. He could still have those slender fingers between his, that head of floppy hair resting on his shoulder, that face still caring about him even when he was unconscious. He hadn't even been reading a book. The only thing Ned was dragging him away from was being a douchebag, and now what was he going to do? Go back to Paris, be an asshole again, pretend it didn't hurt? Go back to missing Grace and add Ned to the list of people he'd lost? One name on there was more than enough.
He realised his breathing had sped up, but it was too late to do anything about it. He'd gone from being freezing cold in the air conditioned departure lounge to boiling hot, as if his own skin were one layer too many. He yanked his sweater over his head as he tried to hear anything other than blood rushing in his ears and the drumming of his own heart as his leg started to twitch nervously.
The only way he could mask his panic was to look back at the couple. The man had given up on his book by now, resting it on his lap and leaning his head back slightly, closing his eyes to try and get some sleep. Just as he started to doze off, his girlfriend opened one eye and looked up at him. She smiled a secretive sort of smile, enjoying a moment she would probably never tell anyone about, not even him, before settling back against him. She flexed her fingers before relaxing them again, back into the position that was obviously so familiar to her.
He didn't know how to get his suitcase back or if he was allowed to leave the airport now that he'd checked in or what his parents would say if they found out. All he knew was that he had to get out of the airport, and he had to get back to Ned.