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For a long time he thinks it starts in 1921, the day that Adam asks to speak to him away from the company of his father and the others.
1921 seems like a correct answer from his still linear understanding of time. He’s lived nowhere but the present and then the next day in a neat orderly line. Even the visitations from his older self fail to make time anything but linear. In a few years he’ll believe he was failing Adam by not understanding so much of what he was taught. He’s stood in Adam’s shadow for so long, been born and raised into it, but when Adam speaks he only pretends to grasp his meaning.
Adam probably knows this. There seems to be little Adam doesn’t know.
So he shouldn’t be surprised that Adam knows how deep his admiration runs, that he would gladly submit to any of their leader’s whims. If this is a whim. It certainly doesn’t feel like it. He’s seen how most men act out their whims from living at the inn. Passion and desire eased with money passed, and fervent hands, skirts hiked up. Adam is not an ordinary man and whatever exists between them is nothing like that.
It would be a lie to say he’s unafraid. It seems the only appropriate emotion when stretched out naked before Adam that first time, but he keeps quiet and doesn’t get in the way. He’s unsure what he did to make Adam pick him over anyone else in Sic Mundus but he’s proud of it. And he’s proud when he can make himself easily submit to Adam’s warm scarred fingers around his cock and probing into his ass.
It goes on like this for weeks, these clandestine meetings where he strips and gets fucked by an incredible man he’s marginally afraid of.
The others know, which is good because he has no desire to keep it a secret, but bragging seems crass so he simply walks around, mildly anxious and vaguely full of himself. The first night he thinks his father might say something about it while they’re eating dinner. He puts his knife and fork down after only a couple bites and stares at Hanno with a tense, pinched look on his face.
After a moment he silently goes back to eating. There’s a look in his eyes that Hanno has come to associate with him pretending at a coldness that he doesn’t really feel. Hanno tries not to smile at that. His father has gone too far, sacrificed too much, to stand in Adam’s way now.
"Explain a causal loop to me," Adam says while Hanno is kneeling naked at his feet, his mouth full of cock. Adam asks him these questions sometimes, everyone in Sic Mundus does because it's vital for him to understand. He's pretty sure most of the other boys his age attend a one room school or learn to read from their parents.
Hanno sits back on his heels and wipes his mouth. "It’s...a type of time paradox," he says uncertainly. He wishes he could go back to sucking Adam off, it's harder to make a fool of himself that way. "One where an event only happens because someone traveled back in time to cause it. And the time traveling was also caused by the event."
Adam runs a hand through his hair in a soothing gesture which Hanno assumes means he was correct. "Yes. A young man's father commits suicide. He travels to a time before his father's death in an attempt to stop it but accidentally triggers it instead." He remains statue-still beneath Adam's hand. "Grieved, the young man attempts to go back in time to prevent his father's suicide."
Slowly, he looks up at Adam. Adam’s eyes are distant but otherwise his face is completely expressionless.
"I understand," he says quietly, though he doesn't entirely at that point.
“You’ll be going into the future tomorrow,” Adam says to him on the last day, when Hanno has come all over his own chest and is crying slightly against his wishes. Adam’s voice is as firm and slow as it always is, as though nothing at all has just happened between them. “And you won’t see me again for some time.”
“Yes,” Hanno says automatically, still catching his breath. Then his mind freezes, goosebumps erupting across his skin. “What? Now?”
He shouldn’t be afraid. He’s known for years that his destiny was a hundred years in the future, planting the seeds for eternity.
“Tomorrow, Hanno. I’m sending you to me.” Adam stands from where he was leaning over him on the bed, taking the warmth of his proximity with him. “I‘ll need you, though I won’t understand that at the time. You and I are linked, in more ways than you could possibly imagine.”
Adam sits down beside him and places a hand carefully on his cheek. Hanno’s heart picks up harder than when he’d been on the edge of orgasm. He pictures the frightened young traveler he’d met not so long ago with his lost eyes and his bleeding throat. It seems impossible to reconcile him with the man Adam is now.
“You’ve said we’re friends. In the future.”
“Yes,” Adam says slowly.
“What do I do with you? When we meet?”
“I wouldn't worry about it. Everything you do will be the right thing to do. Every decision you make has already been made and is just another link in the knot that ties time together.”
It takes a very long time for the boy who will one day be Adam to stop being suspicious of him.
Hanno isn’t surprised. Compared to when they last met Jonas has lost that persistent aura of fear around him. There’s something harder and colder in its place. He doesn’t have Adam’s devastating calm but the determination is there.
He didn’t make Hanno nervous when they first met. Now, occasionally, he does.
In the weeks after he stops Jonas’s suicide attempt he clings far too much. An illogical fear grips him that somehow time will allow Jonas to succeed in dying and everything Sic Mundus has worked towards will fail because of his own stupidity. Despite all he knows he feels incredibly stupid.
Elisabeth likes Jonas which is a small mercy since it means he has to divide his time between them less. Adam may not have told him what to do with his younger self but Noah was explicit in how he handle Elisabeth. He’d even taught Hanno a few dozen signs. Seeing the two of them together seems to melt some of Jonas’s fears. Perhaps his association with Elisabeth has improved him in Jonas’s eyes.
Out of necessity they get used to each other.
Hanno learns to keep the awe out of his voice and Jonas relaxes enough to go on food runs together and occasionally speak to him about nothing at all. It’s not something he’s entirely used to: Hanno was raised among his elders and has little experience with boys his own age. But at least Jonas doesn't expect him to be too normal.
“It seems unfair,” Jonas says to him one day. It isn’t raining for the first time in days and Jonas has rolled his long sleeves up. They’d found a container of overly sweet protein bars and the first bite had nearly made Hanno gag.
“What’s unfair?” He takes a second, larger bite, determined to be done eating as quickly as possible.
Jonas overturns a pile of rubble, still looking around. “If you’d shown up in Winden a year, even a few months earlier, you could’ve actually enjoyed the 21st century.”
Hanno gestures around the collapsed house they’re currently picking through, the fallen bookshelf he’s using as a bench.
“The real 21st century. You left, what, a year after the war? And then you come here to witness the end of days. You missed everything good about the future. Air conditioning, video games.” He gestures at the protein bar Hanno is eating. “Processed foods.”
“The second Great War, Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall,” Hanno says, ticking off his fingers. “I learned plenty.”
“There were good things too. I mean, have you ever even left Winden?”
“Have you?” Hanno asks a little defensively.
Jonas stops in his tracks. “Yeah, have you?”
Hanno slows his furious chewing to give himself time to think. “No,” he says finally. “Too much to do.”
Jonas seems to catch his meaning and he goes back to rifling through objects in the house. But eventually he asks, “how long have you known Adam?”
“Long enough,” he says vaguely, hoping he won’t ask further questions. He doesn’t, but probably because he finds a case of liquor and adolescent curiosity gets the better of both of them.
Jonas claims he’s had plenty of drinks before but he usually had to hide it from his parents. Hanno intends to drink less than Jonas to stay sober, but he severely misjudges how much vodka it will take to get him drunk. He’d seen his father drunk in the past and had drinks at the inn occasionally but that was usually beer or wine, not hard liquor. The drinking loosens Jonas slightly, some hint of the despair in his eyes easing. It’s still impossible to see Adam in his features. He’s far too pretty.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Jonas says, reclined on a dusty couch. Hanno is sitting by his feet. “You know, stare at me like I’m your messiah and you’re trying to study me.”
Hanno nods and looks down, face warm. Adam had never commented on his staring.
He sees Jonas cringe out of the corner of his eyes. “Don’t obey me like that.”
Hanno looks up instinctually in case that’s what Jonas wants and then down again. “Sorry,” he mumbles. The liquor makes it hard to remember how to pretend he's Jonas’s equal.
“I know I…I am. Or you like, you think I’m your messiah. But I’m not him.”
Hanno drains his cup and holds his tongue, regardless of how much he wants to disagree.
“What did Adam do to make you do all of this?” Jonah asks, voice heavy with something that might be guilt. “Make you come here and live out your life in the future?”
“He asked me to do it.”
“That’s it?”
Hanno shrugs. “He’s Adam. I do what he says.”
“Why? Did he—“ he, always he, never I with Jonas, he notes, “raise you or something?”
“No," he says quickly, "I have a father. But Adam was always around.”
“You were born into Sic Mundus.”
“Yes.”
Jonas doesn’t comment on that but he does rub wearily at his eyes. It’s preferable to some kind of apology since he hasn’t yet committed the offense he feels the need to apologize for. He wonders if they’re done talking and he should head back to Elisabeth before he makes the situation worse.
Before he can think about standing Jonas speaks up. “Would you do what I say then?”
He can’t resist looking up now. Jonas is sitting up and resting his arms on his knees, his own cup clenched tightly in his hands. There’s a strange feeling in the air, not so different from what he felt in the days before Adam first pulled him aside and told him to sit beside him. Like an inevitability.
He knows the answer is yes.
“Maybe,” he says evenly, like there isn’t a lump in his throat. “But you’d have to be saying something smart.”
They do this sometimes as time passes. Jonas moves into the bunker and sometimes when Elisabeth is asleep he sneaks off and the two of them talk and drink. It gets easier to hold his liquor and harder not to stare at Jonas.
“Have you ever wanted anything else?” Jonas asks him. The campfire had been between them until the smoke started to blow into his eyes. Now he’s sitting beside Hanno instead.
Wanted anything. He thinks about Adam’s hand on his thigh, firm and certain and wonders if he’d wanted that. It's been several years at this point and he isn't sure. Certainly he wanted Adam’s trust and to be in his confidence but he can’t say the thought of them having sex had ever occurred to him. It was Adam’s touch that made it a possibility.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, deliberately obtuse.
“Anything Adam didn’t plan for you.” Jonas pushes his hair out of his face as he says it. It’s an absentminded gesture, slow and unthinking. His hair has gotten long lately and there’s dirt under his nails. It’s hot out today so he’s only wearing a shirt. Around Elisabeth he keeps his jacket zipped up over the scar on his throat. She isn’t so delicate that she’d be bothered by the sight but Hanno doesn’t question it. There’s something he likes about being the only person to see it.
He doesn’t realize that he’s forgotten to answer until Jonas moves again and he looks away from the scar. In a strange surreal moment Jonas puts a hand on his thigh in exactly the way Adam had, only slowly and less firm. For a moment he forgets what year it is.
His thoughts spin. Was this why Adam touched him before he left? Was it his real hint on how best to serve his younger self?
There’s something knowing in Jonas’s expression as he turns to him and touches his face, something strange and Adam-like. He’s frightened anew, though he shouldn’t be, though serving Adam has always been his duty and now the gap between their ages is immaterial.
He thinks about Elisabeth, about his older self’s vehemence that he treat her well. He wishes Noah could’ve been a bit more forthcoming in this regard. Is he being unfaithful if they haven’t kissed yet and she has no idea they’re going to be together?
Hanno is passive and unresisting as Jonas unzips his hoodie and pushes up the shirt beneath it. He is passive and unresisting up until Jonas makes an annoyed noise and unzips his own pants, shoving Hanno’s hand into them. And then Hanno is passive but compliant.
Does this make us equals? he wonders drunkenly, the smell of Jonas’s breath in his nose as they tug each other off, both of them gasping in the dark. Am I supposed to allow this?
Probably, he decides. If it’s happening now it’s happened before.
Jonas’s hand is unfamiliar, both in its clumsiness and it’s lack of confidence, but Hanno leans forward and rests his forehead against Jonas’s shoulder and it’s almost right. Almost like he has Adam and his cold certainty back. He didn’t realize he missed it.
It’s 2024. In the time to come he thinks this is where it starts for Jonas.
He isn’t entirely sure what Jonas got out of the encounter—which is not far off from how he felt with Adam. He supposes it may really have just been about getting off. Hanno goes back to the cave afterwards. Elisabeth is up when he returns and looks visibly relieved at the sight of him.
Write me a note next time you go shit in the woods, she signs. And then, you okay?”
Hanno isn’t sure how he feels and he doesn't know how to express that in words, much less in sign. I’m fine, he says instead, sorry.
He comes to a better understanding of his role in the future on another day, when he and Jonas are scavenging together again. Jonas finds a container of nuts and holds it out towards Hanno.
“Here,” Jonas says. He holds the bag out to Hanno. “You can have these.”
“I’m allergic to nuts. I think Elisabeth is too.”
“Wow that’s—“ Jonas stops himself, eyes going distant. He drops the container to the floor, something cold and familiar overtaking his eyes. “So am I.”
Hanno clamps his mouth shut so quickly his teeth click.
“Martha and I bonded over it once, when we first started talking. I remember thinking…it’d be easy for us to get dinner together since we had the same meal preferences.”
Hanno slides down onto his knees beside him, silent and unsure. Adam had always told him that if he must choose between saying too much or too little he should lean towards too little. But he knows if Jonas asks him how they’re related he’ll fold immediately.
He swallows instead and reaches out to touch Jonas’s shoulder. Jonas shifts away from his touch and gets to his feet.
“We,” Jonas says quietly, “this entire town. All of it. It’s an abomination.”
“That’s not true,” Hanno says, still on his knees.
Jonas’s laugh startles a flinch out of him. “How is it not? Would any of this have happened if I didn’t exist?”
“You have to exist,” Hanno says fervently. He reaches out and grasps Jonas’s pant leg.
“I know.” Jonas rubs his hands over his face miserably. “Time won’t let me die.”
Hanno pulls and Jonas stumbles easily forward until he can rest his forehead on him. He shuts his eyes, holding tightly to Jonas. “No it won’t. You’re everything.”
Jonas breathes in sharply and he looks up.
He knew his posture was supplicant but the additional suggestion of him on his knees doesn’t hit him until that moment. His chin is resting on the fly of Jonas’s pants and he can tell from Jonas’s startled expression that they’re having the same thought. They’re both completely sober.
“Do you…” Jonas starts to say and Hanno means to say yes Adam, thy will be done but he doesn’t finish the question. Instead he frees his cock, hands trembling and holds himself to Hanno’s mouth.
He’s lucky—Adam gave him experience here and Jonas gets hard much faster than he will when he’s older. He’s no expert but he doesn’t shrink away from Jonas’s cock in his mouth and simply does his best. It’s easier, actually. Jonas is so vocal that it’s way easier to tell that he likes Hanno focusing on the head and working him over with his hand.
He gets hard while he’s shoving Jonas’s cock down his throat. It’s a strange revelation. He wonders if this is something he wants.
They don’t speak about it but it happens again a few months later. Hanno gets shot in the arm stealing gasoline and after Jonas patches him up he yanks his pants down around his ankles and sucks him off while Hanno gasps, delirious from pleasure and lost blood. From then on it’s something of a routine, though not one that Hanno feels right initiating himself. He feels better thinking of it as being at Adam’s beck and call once more.
He quickly learns that he had things better in the past with Adam as his partner. Adam clearly knew his body extremely well, knew how to reduce him to a shaking, crying mess. In contrast Jonas is inexperienced and uncomfortable. The first time they fuck Hanno has to show him how to slick him up with the scant lubricant they can find. It does however get better from there.
A few days after he and Elisabeth finish their makeshift house and move their belongings into it Jonas drags him back to the cave and fucks him there among the scraps of belongings they hadn’t bothered to take. When Hanno’s voice starts to echo Jonas silences him with a kiss.
“You’re a terrible kisser,” Jonas says when he breaks away, eyes glassy and bitter laughter in his voice.
Adam never kissed me, he doesn’t say. Instead he learns. He comes to expect that on those rare days when Jonas kisses him, the same days he usually insists that they fuck in a bed with Hanno on his back, that all he’s really doing is trying to fuck Martha. He almost asks once, when he sees Jonas with his eyes shut, his touch almost tender. But he doesn’t want to know. His messiah isn’t supposed to be so mortal as to pine over his childhood crush. If Jonas is that pathetic he’d prefer not to know.
So, do you love him, Elisabeth asks him once, after he comes home late, probably reeking of Jonas. She’s wrapped in a blanket that Hanno made for her, one hand holding a mug of tea.
No, he signs back, shaking his head vigorously. He hadn’t even been aware that she suspected anything, much less that she believes he has feelings. Jonas is a means to an end. To paradise.
Elisabeth nods, looking extremely unimpressed. He still doesn’t know how to explain it to her any further. Adam is a constant. Love would be much simpler.
When he first sees Jonas in 2019 he doesn’t recognize him. Noah is being driven to the church for the first time and the boy rides by on his bicycle, hair glistening in the summer sun. For almost a minute afterwards he thinks nothing of it before the face of his friend and his supposed savior rematerializes in his mind.
He isn’t sure why he didn’t recognize him. Jonas is only half a year younger than he would be when he first traveled to the 1920s. The only difference in his physical appearance was shorter hair and lack of scars. Still the normal, happy teen had escaped his notice.
Jonas surprises him only two months later when he walks into the church of his own volition. Though, as Adam had reminded him more than once, our volitions aren’t really our own. He’s wearing his grief now like a shroud.
“I don’t really know why I’m here,” Jonas says the first time, tears in his eyes. He doesn’t take the offered seat and keeps his hands in his yellow jacket. “I’m not exactly religious.”
Noah takes mercy on him. “You’re Jonas Kahnwald, right? I heard about your father.”
Jonas shakes his head, though Noah doesn’t think he’s disagreeing. He starts to back away. “I’m sorry. I’m just going to go.”
He puts a hand on Jonas’s shoulder before he can take another step away. Noah can imagine exactly how the hand on his shoulder feels, can feel Adam’s hand on him in the exact same way like a brand that 33 years can’t begin to erase.
“That’s alright,” he says. “I’m here to help. Come back any time you need to.”
For a time Noah sticks to script when Jonas comes to speak to him.
It works well enough. Jonas admits to having recently been let out of the hospital, to seeing a psychiatrist and being on anti-anxiety medications. He admits to sleeping with a friend’s girlfriend and only regretting that he’d been too cowardly to make the first move. Jonas opens up to him more over the course of those days than he did in the decades they spent together. It’s frightening how much Jonas simply never said. Noah takes in each new fact hungrily.
He’s being offered pieces of Adam’s mind. He isn’t sure if he can trust Adam anymore, but this wounded child has no reason to lie to him.
“I can’t shake this feeling,” Jonas says, sitting beside him on a pew, “that my dad wouldn’t have killed himself if it weren’t for me.”
“That’s not true,” he says automatically, before he realizes that it’s a lie. He hopes Jonas doesn’t hold that one against him. Jonas nods to himself, not seeing his inner turmoil.
“That’s what everyone says. But it’s how I feel.”
Noah nods too. Unthinking, he rests his hand on Jonas’s thigh and squeezes firmly. It’s been years since he’s reached for Adam’s supposed wisdom but he does so now.
“We can control our actions but we can’t control our will.” Something Adam had said to him, quoting a philosopher that he couldn’t remember the name of. He curses himself for paraphrasing. At Jonas’s frown he says, “the way we feel, that is. The impulses that drive us.”
“Are you talking about my dad and his suicide or me and my feelings?”
“Both if you like.”
Jonas sniffs. “Sounds like what my doctor says about how you can’t control your feelings but you can control your actions.”
“Yes. That’s better put.”
Jonas looks down at the hand that Noah realizes he’s left on his thigh and then up at him with his soft wet eyes. Such a normal person, with his normal grief, untested by everything that will one day come. Weaker than Noah has ever seen him and pleading silently for him to do something, for his pain to end.
When he’d been younger, when he and Jonas were almost the same age, Jonas had known something when he touched him. He’d known he wouldn’t be rejected.
Because he already knew Hanno wanted him.
An ugly mixture of confusion, anger and disappointment rises up inside of him. Adam had chosen him when he was a boy. Had he wanted Hanno at all or had it all been vengeance for what Noah is currently thinking of doing? Or had he simply wanted a convenient whore to make the apocalypse easier?
He doesn’t have to do this, he thinks, looking down at Jonas’s soft mouth. If he pulled his hand away then this sweet, young Jonas, perpetually too scared to make the first move, would pull away too. He’d never reach for Hanno at the end of days and Adam would never fuck him.
Even as he’s telling himself this he’s going hard in his slacks. Jonas tilts his head up at the ghost of a touch beneath his chin, Noah’s other hand moving up his thigh. Jonas looks almost grateful. Hanno probably wore the same expression that first time.
It was a nice thought, but he does want Jonas. And Adam taught him long ago that his supposed free-will was no match for time.
He used to believe things started between them in 1921.
Now he isn’t so sure.