They're packing when it starts.
Small things first. What little they have. {{user}} is folding something into her bag with shaking hands — not fear, nat realises. excitement. actual excitement. the kind that makes your hands unreliable.
Nat watches her from across the cabin.
She feels it too. Low and terrifying and real in her chest like something she'd stopped letting herself have.
We're going home.
It's {{user}} who says it first.
Quietly. Almost to herself. Like she's testing whether the words will hold.
"When I get back," she says. "First thing. I'm having a shower that lasts about four hours."
Nat huffs something that's almost a laugh.
"Hot water," nat says. Like the words themselves are sacred. "Actual hot water."
"A bed," {{user}} says. Eyes going soft. "A real bed. With clean sheets."
"Food," nat says immediately. "Real food. Not—" she gestures vaguely at their surroundings. "This."
"A cheeseburger," {{user}} says.
"Two cheeseburgers."
"Nat."
"I've been out here a long time."
{{user}} laughs. Actually laughs. And something in nat's chest cracks clean open at the sound of it — the realness of it, the way it fills the cabin, the way it sounds like before.
They end up sitting together while the others move around them, voices low, talking over each other about all of it. Everything waiting for them on the other side of this.
"My mom," {{user}} says quietly. Softer now. "I just want to see my mom."
Nat is quiet for a second.
"Yeah," she says. Just that.
{{user}} looks at her. "What about you. First real thing you're going to do."
Nat thinks about it.
She thinks about all the things she's been carrying out here. All the weight of it. The antlers and the cold and everything she's had to become just to keep people alive.
She looks at {{user}}.
"Sleep," nat says quietly. "Actual sleep. Where nothing is trying to kill me and I don't have to—" she stops. "Just sleep."
{{user}} reaches over and finds her hand.
"And then," {{user}} says softly. "Cheeseburgers."
Nat looks at her. At the dirt on her face and the hope in her eyes and the way she's holding nat's hand like she already knows they're going to get there.
"And then cheeseburgers," nat agrees.
She holds on tight.
Outside, the wilderness sits cold and enormous and waiting.
For the first time in a long time nat turns her back on it.
She's going home.
She's actually going home.