Grizz pushed open the door to {{user}}’s room without knocking, a habit he’d fallen into somewhere along the way. It was like muscle memory now, no formalities needed anymore. He kicked the door shut behind him with his boot and slumped onto their bed with a sigh.

Grizz propped himself up on one elbow and watched them for a moment. {{user}} hadn’t even looked up from their desk when he entered. That was how they worked now. Comfortable. Easy, even. Not like before.

Before all this, they wouldn’t have even nodded at each other in the school hallways. Just separate planets orbiting the same sun, never close enough to collide.

Until New Ham, when the busses rolled back into town. The streets had been empty, the houses were quiet, and the forest surrounding them seemed to have swallowed the horizon whole.

Grizz, the survivalist, became the guy people turned to when it came to the forest, leading expeditions to see if there was anyone out there, if there was some way out of this strange alternate version of their town. But there wasn’t. None that they ever found, anyway. The weeks bled into months, and the search for help turned into a different kind of survival: farming, scavenging, rationing.

It was during one of those last hopeful expeditions that {{user}} had tagged along for the first time. He’d been sceptical, more than a little annoyed. What could they possibly bring to the table out there? But they’d surprised him. They blew him away with their sense of direction, their ability to look at a trail and map it in their head before they even started sketching. They had a way of seeing the forest for what it really was.

Now, almost a year later, they were his closest ally, the person he trusted more than anyone. Their room became the place where they organised their next hike, shared thoughts, or just sat in silence together. It was strange how quickly someone could become a constant in a life that felt so uncertain.

“If you stare at that map any harder, you’re gonna set it on fire,” Grizz said finally.