Their room still looked the same, dark and empty. It smelt the same too with the stale cigarette smoke somewhere underneath it all.

It was to the sound of Cain's four footsteps that Abel stopped. It was the same sudden halt that he had felt when the Reliant had shuddered and there had suddenly been so much glass between the stars. The same halt that his wrists had reached when he had fallen down the stairs such a long time ago.

The overhead lights clicked on and made his pupils dilate too quickly. It was just a room with a bed, a desk, and a broken chair. His feet flinched forwards and he continued on further into the room.

He made it across the room before a wave of nausea curled over him. It ran up his spine and behind his eyes, but instead of sinking to the ground, he placed his hands on the desk. The soft rumble of the Sleipnir ran through his hands and the swirling of the room stilled into the slight vibration under his hands. Just like the pressure of his hands on the control console of the Reliant or the cold granite floor beneath the staircase, all he had to do was hold onto that feeling and everything would be alright.

When the trembling of his hands was less than the sensation under his skin, he lifted his hands off the desk and drew in a deep breath. He was supposed to be over this by now.

"What was that?"

Abel turned to see Cain still standing by the door, his feet barely past the frame. There was only a slight crease under his eyes, not the sharp lines that usually defined his glares.

"Nothing."

Cain stepped past the threshold and pressed the door closed with a brush of fingers instead of the usual fist. Leaning against the wall, he crossed his arms across his chest and stared at Abel with the same strange lines underneath his eyes.

"Sure about that?"

A slight shake began in Abel's hands and he willed himself not to look down at them. Instead he pressed them to his sides and focused on a stain on Cain's shirt. It was the same shade of rust Abel had seen far too many times on Cain's skin after another of his constant late nights. Abel hated that colour.

"You should clean up."

Cain's fingers snapped into fists but he still kept his arms crossed tightly against his chest. Abel remembered the time he had spent the day at a beach, grinding wet rocks against each other until there was nothing left. That was the sound coming out of Cain.

"Yea, I probably should-"

Cain uncrossed his arms and the stain shifted slightly. His shirt wasn't torn so it was probably someone else's blood. Then Cain was glaring at him with the same old lines Abel had grown so used to. They still made him look too old so Abel just stared, hoping they would disappear back into his skin.

"-and maybe you should to."

Cain's eyes were suddenly wide and unfocused, searching for something on Abel's face or maybe in his eyes. Abel wasn't quite sure what it was so he just left everything blank. Maybe Cain could fill it in himself.

"You smell terrible."

There were never any blanks on Cain's face for Abel to fill in. He was always so expressive with his anger, filling everything with deep lines in his skin, marking it out like a map.

"Two weeks in the shithole and that's all you got to say princess?"

He stepped closer but not with his usual tightly-wound steps, but like he was testing the temperature of water before jumping in. He stopped three, not four, steps away from Abel and narrowed his eyes back into a glare. There were a few more stains on Cain's shirt, but they could have been shadows.

"You have blood on your shirt."

Cain stepped closer but he still didn't come close enough to grab Abel's shirt or snarl in his face. Just hovered as close as he could without touching. Cain was such a tactile person, always grabbing at Abel and thinking running his hands over his skin would make Abel understand. Now his hands flexed by his sides and fingered the empty air.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

Abel felt his lips twitch. Blood was beginning to thud against his forehead and he desperately wanted to drop onto the bed and pretend to go to sleep. Instead, Abel dragged his gaze up Cain's chest and to his eyes. They weren't as unfocused now, but they had something else in them that Abel would have called fear if it was anyone else. But this was Cain.

"I'm fine."

Cain flinched forward, his hands ghosting over Abel's shoulders then back to his own sides. Then his shoulders sunk in line with his collarbones with a sigh. Cain didn't sigh.

"You're not 'fine' Abel."

He said it with such resigned authority that Abel felt something in his chest flare. Like all the times Abel had stared out the window while his parents screamed at each other in the kitchen and he would just watch the rain hit the windows as his fists dug into his thighs.

"How would you know? You haven't even been here."

Cain's eyes widened and the corners of his lips curled.

"Is that what's got you so weird? I wouldn't have been down there if you hadn't been such a fucking idiot."

Abel's hands trembled against his thighs and not matter how hard he pressed them down, they still seemed to shake.

"How it this my fault?"

If tendons shifting underneath skin made an audible noise, it would no doubt be their soundtrack. For now there was the tension in Cain's jaw and lines around his eyes.

"It's always your fault. You're always pulling shit like this."

"Pulling what?"

"Pulling what- like you don't fucking know-"

Abel wanted to say something smart. He wanted to tell Cain that, of course he knew. There was very little he didn't know. He had learned to read at a very young age.

"-you ever think about this shit before you do it? Or do you just have some fucking suicide complex that just makes you do it-"

And then he realized that he didn't. He didn't know why he had woken up alone in medical and every night since, why everyone had been giving him sidelong glances, why there were strange, new lines hanging beneath Cain's eyes that somehow matched the scar tissue across his own chest.

He lifted his hands from his thighs and stared at them as they shook.

Why everything kept spinning long after the Reliant had already turned 180 degrees and Cain was behind the bullets instead of in front of them.

"Abel."

Cain looked down at him with his strange eyes, looking like Abel did when he looked out windows and tried not to hate the rain for not being loud enough to drown out everything else. Like Abel on the hangar bay windows, just an outline composed of constellations and light.

Abel found his hands pressing against the stained fabric of Cain's shirt. There was nothing but silence, not even a tremor between his fingers as he spread them across Cain's chest. Instead of the rumble of the Sleipnir there was another faint rhythm beneath Abel's hands that made the room halt its constant spin.

"I'm so tired."

A long silence stretched out between them before Cain shifted and caught the end of Abel's sigh with his own voice.

"I know."

Somehow Abel's face ended up pressed against the shadows on Cain's shirt and it might have been from the his hands being wound so tightly in the fabric or the pressure of Cain's arms across his back, but then he found his eyes closing and there wasn't anything but a soft rhythm and then nothing.

They lay next to each other in the morning, staring up in the cracks on the ceiling and Abel smiled as he ran his hands over his chest and found the lines across his skin were almost shadows. When he flicked his eyes over to Cain and he widened his smile a little more because the lines around Cain's eyes weren't anything but shadows as well.

A/N:
What the hell is this.

Thanks to everyone for being so wonderful and letting me poison the fandom with my poetic angst prose. This was only supposed to be a one-shot, then I foolishly decided to continue on with it. There was a lot more I wanted to do with this story but damn, if I spent too much more time fidgeting every time I opened this back up, I would have gone insane.

I'll probably try my hand at this again and write something a little different when I get around to posting it on AO3 (all my new stuff is there).
Hope it was a good read and I'm always open to suggestions for things I can turn into a vortex of introspection and feelings.

p.s- Google the title/chapter names. Do it. Enjoy it.