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The world outside is emptier than Bam thought it would be.
The sky is endless and the stars are beautiful, he'll admit, but all of it is so devastatingly far away that it makes his heart ache. After spending all this time dragging himself up and bashing through ceilings, it is disconcerting to suddenly run up against a vast empty nothingness.
So he turns away from the sky, and looks to his companions, spread out around him like constellations. Khun is the closest, spread eagle on his back, gazing at the sky with the most peaceful expression Bam has ever seen on him. Rak is fast asleep.
A bubble pops from the large crocodile's nose. Just like that, the ache inside him is gone.
"So this is the sky," Khun says quietly. His mouth quirks up into a little smile. "It's both overwhelming and boring at once."
Bam agrees silently. He could stare up at it forever. He could never glance up at it again.
He sits down, cross-legged, just as Khun sits up.
The ground here is soft and grassy, and in the far distance beneath the hill they're on there is a long line of trees. There's no sign of the Tower anywhere. It's hard to measure distances here, but Bam thinks that even if he placed the entirety of the Tower right where he stood, there would still be no way to climb up to the stars. Maybe the whole thing had been a madman's dream after all.
Khun is still picking grass stems off the back of his shirt, twirling them around in his fingers before tossing them away. The expression on his face, like he's offended that these bits of dirt and dust would dare to stick to him like that, makes Bam smile.
Khun catches his expression, flicks a pebble at him that hits Bam square in the nose.
"What are you smiling for?"
"I'm glad you're here," Bam tells him honestly. "I'm glad I met you. Everyone here, but especially you. I never would have made it here if not for you."
Khun stares at him, more caught off guard than Bam has ever seen him.
He's never seemed this vulnerable before, all wide eyes and stunned silence. It goes on for longer than Bam expects it to.
"What?" Bam asks, amused. He picks himself up a bit so that he can sit next to Khun and talk that way. The sky doesn't seem so cold and distant when he can feel Khun's body heat next to him.
"I hardly did anything," Khun is so quiet that Bam can barely hear him. He is strangely tense, fingers braced against his knees, interlocked together like he's trying to hold himself together, or keep something out. "You were the one doing all the fighting, and risking your life. You were alone, too, at the end."
"That's not true." Bam turns towards him, insistent. "I knew I wasn't alone. I knew you guys were there for me. That meant all the difference in the world."
Khun scoffs, shooting him one of his old, easy smiles.
"How incredibly cliche," he drawls. "Aren't you embarrassed saying something like that?"
"I mean it," Bam smiles back. He leans closer, like he's sharing a secret. "The truth is, if you weren't here with me right now, I'd be just the same as I was in that cave. I'd be all alone, and none of this -" his gesture encompasses the trees, the land, the sky, "- would mean a thing."
But instead of making Khun smile, his words make the other boy freeze.
This has been happening more and more often with Khun, as of late.
Bam knows that he's hiding something, but he thought that it could wait, at least, until they were out of the Tower. He thought, at first, that it had something to do with Rachel. But Khun had been perfectly content with letting Bam deal with her in the end.
"Khun," he asks, suddenly serious. "What is it?"
"You say the damndest things sometimes," Khun replies. His smile is more than a little wobbly, like he's unsure of something.
Bam tilts his head, considering. What had he said? None of what he said had been a lie.
Khun shakes his head at him with a helpless, fond smile, then returns his attention to the sky. Bam wonders if he's feeling sad, or maybe a bit lonely, because there's a strange look in his eyes that he couldn't hide. The thought of Khun, feeling lonely even with Bam at his side, hurts.
The silence stretches as Bam spends a long time poking and prodding at that feeling. He wonders if there was somebody that Khun had left behind in the tower, someone that he would never see again.
"Khun," he asks, suddenly feeling a lump in his throat. But then he stops, because he doesn't know how to put this sudden uncertainty into words.
When Khun notices his pained expression, he immediately turns to Bam, worried.
"What's the matter?"
Bam stares at him, unable to find the words.
There's something rising in the sky now, something round and white and huge compared to the stars around it. King Jahad had called it the moon. His mother had loved it, he had been told.
Around them, the rest of his companions stare at it in wonder, entranced. But Bam keeps studying the way Khun looks at him, the soft frown tugging down at the corners of his mouth, his eyebrows drawn together.
"Do you regret it?" Bam asks finally. "Coming up the tower with me?"
Khun's eyebrows raise immediately. "What kind of question is that?"
Bam shrugs, and has to look away, because he might be staring too much. He stares out across the field instead, trying to get his heart rate to settle.
"You know, we might be considered gods now." That isn't what he wants to say, but it's all he can come up with. Khun's gaze narrows suspiciously. "We've climbed up the entirety of the tower now. I wonder if we can still be human, after that."
He's shocked by a hand coming up to tousle his hair. The unexpectedness of it makes him yelp and reach up to catch Khun's wrist. Khun just laughs at him.
"Nah, you still seem pretty human to me." He grins, but then his expression softens. "You're still you, Bam. You haven't changed a bit from the day I first met you."
It's a relief to hear that. If there's anyone who would know that, it would be Khun.
Bam lets go of his wrist, but for some reason Khun doesn't move his hand away. He's hesitating, again, like he's unsure if he wants to say something.
"I think I have changed," Bam says, desperate to keep the conversation going. He wants to know what it is that Khun is hiding from him. "When I first entered the tower, Rachel was the only thing that I cared about."
He immediately realizes that it's the wrong thing to say. Khun starts to draw his hand back, grimacing.
Without thinking, Bam reaches for his hand to stop him, fingers around Khun's wrist.
Khun's fingers curl loosely in his grasp, just barely brushing against the side of his neck. His blue-eyed gaze is wide and startled.
Bam can feel his wrist, his pulse, the blood pushing through his skin. He wonders if this is what lightning would feel like, if it was slow and sweet, this slow burn traveling through all of him.
"Wait -" he says, because he doesn't want this to stop. He wants time to freeze for just a moment longer. He could squeeze harder, feel the pulse even more clearly underneath his fingertips, but he won't, he can't, he can't ever, he doesn't want to hurt -
His thoughts stutter to a halt.
It takes him another long moment to realize that Khun has stopped breathing. His pulse isn't slowing down, and distantly Bam thinks that it can't be healthy, thinks it must be painful, wonders why -
He's shaken out of his thoughts by the gentle brush of a thumb against the side of his cheek.
Khun settles his hand against the side of Bam's face, something akin to surrender in the wry smile on his lips, the way he considers the fingers making a shackle around his wrist. There's something overwhelming and reassuring about his touch. It doesn't hurt, and all of the air comes rushing back into Bam's lungs in a relieved breath.
"I think I understand now," Khun says. "You have changed."
"What do you mean?"
"You were always looking up," Khun says. "Not because you wanted to, not because you enjoyed it, but because you were curious. I suppose you needed to know why you were thrown away."
"Really? I didn't realize." Khun's fingers against his skin feel cool and pleasant, and Bam can't resist leaning into it a little. "What about you? Were you ever curious about the stars?"
Something in Khun's gaze darkens. He only looks at Bam when he says: "No. I never needed to."
"Why?"
"You were my north star," Khun says. "All I had to do was follow you. Maybe we were all the same, chasing after impossible things, just for different reasons. Rachel just wanted to stare at the sky and bask in its light. You just didn't want to be alone."
"And you?"
"And me?" Khun laughs. His fingers curl around the back of Bam's neck. "I wanted to drag you down and make you mine."