Chapter Text
This apartment?
This broken down apartment, dirty from no cleaning, blank from lack of decoration, the farthest thing from home Karl has ever felt?
Awful.
Rotten, atrocious, disgusting, putrid, whatever negative description applies in this situation. Oh, and college overall is fucking horrendous . It’s lonely, expensive, exhausting, and probably a waste of time at this rate.
When was the last time Karl held a genuine conversation with someone? No one talks to him because of midterms or finals or whatever the fuck is going on at the time, so he hardly has company and it’s not like he has the energy to go looking for any. The only time he’s spoken to is when he’s working in group projects or one-on-one discussions with professors.
It’s the way his life has been for the past four years. He’s used to it, but it still hurts. He’s too social for this, too touchy and energetic to be alone all the time.
It hurts even more that his best friend hasn’t properly talked to him in ages.
Around a year ago, Sapnap suddenly got “busy” and found himself unable to keep close contact with Karl. He’d say he was too tired to talk, or that he forgot to check his messages, or whatever random excuse he had. It was like he wasn’t even making time for Karl anymore.
Okay, to be fair, maybe Karl is just overreacting. Sapnap literally just started college. He’s a sophomore, yeah, but sophomores still struggle to get by. Financial situations get worse and worse if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and sometimes you get unlucky despite knowing. Maybe that’s what’s going on.
That still doesn’t explain the radio silence.
Maybe this entitlement shouldn’t exist. Karl always has this problem. He’s too attached, too close for comfort, and then everything comes crashing down and suddenly he’s left with a broken heart that tries so hard to keep beating. He has to move on at this rate. Why can’t he move on?
That’s a rhetorical question. Karl asks himself those a lot: Why does this happen? Why am I like this? Why do I have to feel this way?
He knows the answer, and it’s that he’s letting buried feelings start to rise from their grave, zombified in the apocalypse that Sapnap has left him in.
That’s a really fucking stupid thing to say. He’s such a drama queen.
It’s probably not that big of a deal and he could maybe see that if he stopped to think about it for more than five minutes. Besides, that’s clearly not what Sapnap needs if he’s going through such a bad time. If he needed help, he’d reach out for it. He knows better, doesn’t he?
Rhetorical questions.
Karl misses him. A lot.
But he won’t say anything about it. It’s been a year. Maybe Sapnap just moved on. But how could he after years of friendship? After what they’ve been through? After something as deep as what they have— what they had?
Goddamnit. He needs a drink. It’s a weekend, anyway.
He goes up to the freezer and pulls out a bottle of wine, then takes a glass from the back of one of his cupboards and fills it halfway. He holds the glass, letting the cold of the wine freeze his thoughts, before he takes a sip and lets it keep any icy words that could leave his tongue frozen.
He thinks.
Wait a fucking minute, he wasn’t asking himself rhetorical questions. That’s— what the fuck was he even asking himself? Rhetorical questions aren’t meant to be answered. Karl knows the answer to a lot of his questions, and if he doesn’t, his search for answers eats him alive until he’s nothing but bone, duh!
And there’s… a lot he doesn’t know.
Maybe he should call him.
Would it be worth it? To possibly throw something so meaningful to him away just because he couldn’t be patient? Does he have any patience left? Could Sapnap be gone because he was the impatient one? He couldn’t have forgotten about Karl. He’ll call someday. One day. Hopefully soon.
Patience is a virtue. Karl can be virtuous. He has to be.
Oh, shit. He hadn’t realized he finished his glass.
Karl pours himself another.
He’s mesmerized as he watches the wine pour out of the bottle. Crimson, blood of grapes, toxic and sweet. Shiny under the light that would be painfully bright if there weren’t broken bulbs.
And he snaps out of it, jerking and spilling out a streak of wine onto the counter, when his phone rings.
He always grabs his phone with light speed anytime it rings. He always clings to his lifeline, hope, anytime it rings.
A very clear name is printed at the top of the screen.
Sapnap.
Holy— wait, really?
Sapnap.
Sapnap…!
He presses the answer button so hard he could have dented the screen and brings the phone to his ear.
“Hello? Sapnap, is that you?” Karl cries with a massive smile. He’s going to get to hear the calming smoothness in his voice, the gravelly bass he’s loved ever since Sapnap’s voice dropped, the quiet and shy tone—
He’s met with shuffling, a bit of static, and essentially no solid response.
And then he’s met with a quiet sniffle that tears at his heart.
“Fuck, are you crying? Are you okay?”
“No, no, I’m not—!” Sapnap mumbles raspily before clearing his throat. “I’m fine, ‘m not crying. Just tired. And the house is a little cold.”
What a sweet sound. Karl wants to listen for days on end. Wants to, but he hears a bit of uncertainty that he’s trained himself to hear. The sound is souring.
“Turn up the thermostat, nimrod.”
“I would, but… whatever. Um… how are you?”
Sapnap sounds so tentative that Karl is back to thinking he might have done something wrong. Why is Sapnap scared of him?
“Awful,” he says without thinking, Goddamnit Karl think before you speak you stupid moron, “but— I mean, uh, that’s not a priority right now. How have you been?”
“You’re… what? Karl, it’s okay if you’re not feeling good. I can… I can call later, when you’re feeling bet—“
“No!”
Shit. Too much.
“I-I mean… no, it’s okay. I wanna talk to you. I haven’t heard from you in ages. Are you doing okay?”
“I just said I’m fine, Karl.”
“Yeah, but I asked if you’re doing okay. Like, how’s your current situation? Are you eating well, good financially… you know, all that stuff?”
“I’ve… been eating.”
“Yeah? Enough to keep you alive or enough to keep you fed?”
Sapnap doesn’t respond.
“How about money? Can you pay for college fine, food, heat, clothes?”
Sapnap still doesn’t respond. A suspicion is confirmed. This must be why Sapnap hasn’t been talking: too much work, too many bills, no electricity wasted. Maybe it’s so bad that charging his phone at home is damaging. That has to be it.
All of a sudden, Sapnap lets out a shaky breath. Guilt claws at Karl’s throat.
“Hey, wait, are you good? I’m sorry, was that too much?”
“I’m okay, Karl! I’m fine, I swear. It’s— it’s cold. You know that much. And it’s not because I don’t have heat, I just don’t… wanna turn up the heat.”
The urge to scream replaces the guilt. Motherfucker, if it’s not money, then what is it? Why won’t you talk to me? What did I do to destroy the bridge that keeps us together?!
Karl doesn’t say anything but “okay.” He takes a sip from his wine, then another, then another, then another, then the glass is empty.
Water is running on the other end of the call, and then something clangs against metal, and the water stops. Karl can hear the phone being put down. Water runs again, and this time when it stops, he can faintly hear scrubbing.
It’s not as bad as he thought. Sapnap seems stable enough. Karl needs to ask. He needs to say something or he’ll be crushed up into a ball of regret.
Yet he doesn’t speak, because if he does, something might solidify the tension between them permanently, and he couldn’t handle it if that happened. None of this was supposed to happen, they were supposed to be a perfect duo that always talked things out and never left each other behind, even when one of them graduated two years before the other, even when one of them was considering dropping out.
He shouldn’t have taken out the wine. He can’t help it when he goes for a third glass and promises himself that it’ll be the last one. For the night.
“I missed you. Still do.”
Karl’s heart skips a beat. He shoves the feeling down, hoping it doesn’t resurface. “You… you do?”
“Yeah. I’ve been really lonely without you.”
“Why didn’t you ever call? Or at least text me?”
Sapnap is quiet.
Karl can’t let himself stay quiet.
“Sapnap, it’s okay if you’ve been busy, but you haven’t talked to me in almost an entire year. ’m… I'm scared for you. I wanna know what’s going on. I’m your best friend, aren’t I? I deserve to know.”
Still nothing.
“Just… please. I miss you. I want— I need to know what’s going on with you. I can’t just let you sit there all alone.” It feels like too much to be saying, yet not enough. Karl can’t push away the way his heart aches, burns, longs, yearns for Sapnap. He couldn’t push it away when he left for college and he can’t push it away now. He can’t stand not knowing.
He’s had four glasses of wine just because he can’t give up on his best friend, someone that he craves so badly, so badly that he has to let the burn of alcohol replace the burn of affection.
When did he get that fourth one?
No more. Karl tosses the glass in the sink, not caring if it breaks, and puts the bottle away.
He barely registers the silence.
“Sapnap?”
A light buzzes above Karl.
“Hey, you there?”
The call audio emits white noise.
A sob. A heavy, painful sob. Karl’s heart feels like it’s been stabbed twenty times and shredded to shit. Fuck, what did he do? Fuck, this can’t be happening!
“I’m sorry! I-I’m so fucking sorry, Karl, I wa- I was gonna talk to you, but—“ He chokes on his words. Karl can practically hear tears hitting the floor, and each second he has to listen to this is another second that brings him closer and closer to an empty, joyless void. Sapnap’s crying is all-consuming and distressing. It’s hard to stay still. He wants to hold him so badly. He wants to grab the glass just to smash it on the floor.
“I didn’t want you to hate me ‘cause I’ve been hiding for so long and I didn’t wanna know what you’d say, and—“
“Sapnap, shhhh. Hey, Sapnap, I promise it’s gonna be okay. Listen to me, buddy. You’re okay. You hearing me? I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.”
“You don’t mean that! You— you used to… you’d fucking hate me if you saw what I got myself into and so I didn’t call and now you’re worried and I don’t deserve it because I’m an awful fucking person—“
“Hey, woah, that’s not true! Sapnap, I need you to stop and let yourself calm down here—“
“I had a baby, Karl!”
He freezes. His racing thoughts come to a halt. His body goes rigid.
He can’t feel his fingers. He can’t feel his fingers.
“You…”
“She… she was born ten months ago. I stopped talking to you when the girl I was with told me she didn’t want the baby anymore, so she told me to take care of it and I didn’t wanna say no because obviously I got her into this mess and I need to be the one to get her out—“
“Sapnap.”
“—so I had to find a new place to live in because raising a baby in a dorm is an awful idea and I wasn’t able to get a break because of exams at the time and the baby and the girl and God I made the worst choices ever, Karl, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you, I promise I was going to—“
“Sapnap!”
The response he gets is a wet cough followed by heavy breathing.
“I need you to calm down. Listen to me, okay? You hear me, right? Tell me you hear me.”
“I h— I hear you.”
“Good. Keep listening to me. We’ll do five, four, three, two, one; starting with five. I’ll go first.”
When they were younger, in Sapnap’s junior year, his anxiety was so awful to the point that he’d constantly have to leave the classroom to recover from a panic attack.
In his underclassman years, anytime he felt so nauseatingly anxious, he’d text Karl and they’d meet in a bathroom to talk until he felt secure enough to go back to class. Sometimes they just texted. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything until the end of the day, when he’d meet Karl in a club or at the entrance and hug him so tight to remind himself that he was okay.
That became impossible once his junior year rolled around. Solutions, however, were not impossible. Karl formulated a very specific one with the intent of staying connected but not reminding each other of their distance. Sometimes he used it for himself.
They used the senses method, but with a twist. One of them—the more stable one at the time—would list the five things he could see, then the other would do his best to do the same. By the time they got down to the one thing they could taste, the unstable one would be grounded enough to fix his breathing.
It’s odd, and it never seems to work with other people, but it works for them.
They list their senses, and when Karl gets down to taste, he’s absolutely relieved to hear Sapnap’s voice cracks fading away.
“One thing I can taste,” he says, “grapes. Bitter grapes. Or maybe the flavoring is just bitter. My mouth tastes dull and bitter.”
“Mine tastes awful. Like gingivitis. I don’t think I have it, but just for comparison.”
“That’s nasty.”
“I’m… yeah. It is.”
“You ready to talk?”
“U-um…” Shit. Was that too forward? “Just gimme a second. I’ll be right back, don’t go anywhere.”
Sapnap doesn’t hang up, but he must mute himself because the static suddenly cuts off. There’s no water running, no sniffling. The quiet rips at Karl’s stomach like shears cutting a captive’s muscle. The good and the bad, the elation and distress, have him tied and gagged with no chance of escape. He knows that already. He just didn’t think he’d be struggling this much in their grasp.
He remembers the taste.
He tosses his phone down somewhere on the counter and checks the sink. He’s immediately hit with extreme nausea, which he reasons must be a combination of the wine and his worrying over Sapnap. The glass didn’t break somehow. Karl washes it and sets it to dry. Then he picks his phone back up and rushes to his bathroom, where he tries to reach for his toothbrush, but feels his stomach churning too much for him to think.
“Goddamnit,” he manages to whisper before dropping his phone and lifting the toilet seat.
Stupid fucking alcohol, he thinks as he hears himself retch.
At least after throwing up, the nausea is gone. Half of it, anyway. It’s just the anxious nausea now. Anxious from all the possible outcomes of the next few words he and Sapnap exchange. Anxious from wondering how he’s going to help Sapnap with money, self care, caring for not only himself but another being. Another being, dependent and tiny, keeping him up and making it harder and harder to save money and stay in school and—
He heaves. This time he manages to push his hair out of his face. He doesn’t manage to keep his tears in.
Why?
That’s all he can manage to ask.
Karl flushes the toilet and rinses his mouth, then finally gets to brushing his teeth vigorously. He brushes until the toothpaste is stained with blood and he scrubs his tongue until he can’t feel it. He rinses and splashes at his mouth until he can’t taste the mint, not even the traces of iron and salt and accursed grape.
For you, Sapnap. It was because of you and now it’ll be for you.
After rinsing his mouth again, Karl leans on the counter and sighs deeply. He can feel his exhaustion starting to alleviate but it’s still so heavy.
He hears static.
What? From where? The cheap radio in the corner of the counter is unplugged, and the lights in this bathroom don’t flicker, so…
Oh. Sapnap’s unmuted.
“How long have you been there?” Karl asks.
“All I heard was you spitting. Not sure what you’re doing.”
“I was brushing my teeth. You wanna do the same?”
“Not yet. I’ll do it before I go to bed.” Karl hopes the time for that comes both soon and later all the same. He wants to keep him up, but he wants him to take care of himself.
“Okay then. Let's start from the top again.”
Sapnap takes a breath on the other end of the line. Karl inhales deeply, then breathes out what he hopes is all of his emotion and feeling.
Because if he’s anything but rational right now, Karl will let his feelings get the best of him. And he has way too many of them for it to be healthy.
He cannot, he cannot ruin this.
“You…” he begins, immediately losing his train of thought. It seems without emotion, his brain is empty. “You haven’t talked to me in a year.”
“No. I haven’t. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t—“ Karl has to take a deep breath again because he feels the frustration start to boil. “Don’t apologize. Yet. If at all. Just explain to me, okay? Tell me what was going on when you stopped talking to me.”
“I… um… oh, gosh, fuck.”
“A-actually, how about we start a little earlier? Say, a few months before we stopped talking. What was going on then?”
“I was… talking to a girl. This was, like, over a few months ago. You know. Super sweet, would make time for me, would listen to me and comfort me, she actually liked things I was into and wouldn’t judge me… I wanted her to stay in my life. She felt like… like a breath of fresh air with all the shit I was going through.”
The frustration is gone. Karl now has to bury pure poison before it can turn his tongue to venom.
Sapnap, with wonder, says, “I loved her. You know how it is.”
Yeah, Karl wants to say, of course I fucking know how it is. You blind piece of shit.
“By that you mean around two years ago?”
“Yeah. It was… what, August of my freshman year? That we got together? And we… well… I-I don’t think I need to really get into the nitty-gritty of what we did.”
“I’d rather you not,” he chuckles, both teasingly and slightly disturbed.
“She… we had… you know. So by then, I wasn’t really scared, you know? But at some point, she… she must have… gone off the pill or something. I don’t know, she had always been on it and we’d used condoms for a while—“ Sapnap groans distastefully. “Sorry, I just feel so gross right now. I don’t like this kind of stuff.”
“It’s okay. Keep trying, you’re doing really well.” Anything to get you to stop talking about her.
“Yeah, so… no protection. I didn't realize. She stopped really… being that close with me. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, then she just—random night in the middle of winter— told me she was pregnant.
“And I…” He sobs quietly. His voice starts cracking again. “With the look she was giving me, I thought calling myself a total failure was an understatement. I completely fucked us over. But you don’t just back out when you fuck up that badly, right?” Jesus fucking Christ, the heartbreak is coming back! How fun, oh, how fucking amazing it feels to want to punch something and break a door down!
“So I said it was okay, that we would raise the baby. We would figure it out together. We would—“ Sapnap whimpers— “we would get through it together. And she said so, but I should have known she was lying, because all of a sudden we were eight months into her pregnancy and she said she’d leave as soon as she had the baby.
“That…” He chokes on his tears. “That was when we stopped talking.”
June. Their last call, their last conversation over text.
“Because… I knew I’d need the time to myself to figure out how the fuck I was going to take care of a baby as a nineteen year old college student.”
And that’s when Karl feels the rope holding his emotions back, the tsunami of hopelessness and loneliness, snap.
He feels so much guilt but so much relief as he spits, “You’re a fucking liar.”
“Wh-what?”
“Sapnap. Really? Not one word about this girl to me? Not one word about the fact that you’d be a dad soon? Not one fucking word about needing money, needing help and tips on parenting, needing anyone that wasn’t your goddamn girlfriend?! Not your dads, not me, not even— not even a hotline?!”
“Karl, please! I’m not lying!”
“So why the fuck didn’t you ask me?!”
“Because you didn’t need to know!”
“And why the fuck not?!”
“The same reason you’re yelling at me right now!”
The guilt turns to shame. Shame that eats away at his sense of self and morality.
“Because—“ sob, choke— “because you would be mad. You would hate me. You’d wonder why I trusted someone that would do that to me. And you’d wonder why I believed her, and why I was with her in the first place when I probably could tell that she would do that. And you’d judge me. And you’d wonder why I’m stupid enough to get myself into this shit.”
Karl hates that he’s right.
Envy wasn’t the only thing he felt when he was hearing about her. The hatred he felt about her had shifted to hate toward her, and with justification for his negativity, he might have used it against Sapnap.
He has a problem.
He doesn’t just have a flaw. He is the flaw. He’s a cracked vase, slowly letting the water nurturing the fruits of his joy leak out until the plants are dead.
This time, his dramatization feels like reality.
Oh, hey, speaking of leaks. Karl’s crying.
“So just… please let me say it. That I'm sorry. That I wanted to tell you, but I just couldn’t. I wanted to so bad. I’m sorry, Karl, please believe me.”
“I only told you not to say that because I knew you were being honest, Sapnap.”
“Why… why are you crying?” Goddamnit, why can he tell?
“Because you may have fucked up, but you’re not the one doing anything wrong here. You’re… you’re so blind, Sapnap. I know, I know, I’m proving you right by saying this shit, but honestly. You convinced yourself that you had wronged her when she was the one that went off the pill. Scratch that, maybe it wasn’t even either of you two’s fault. Birth control has a small chance of not working.”
“It… oh.”
“And you knew she was going to do that, but you ignored it because… well, why did you?”
“Because she needed me. Someone to help her through it all. Mood swings and body problems and pain. And if she had gotten with me of all people, then maybe she thought it would be worth it to stay after all the pain.”
Oh. Okay then. Not like that didn’t break Karl’s heart for the third time tonight or anything. Yeah, no, he totally didn’t choke on the lump in his throat just now. Fuck.
“But she didn’t stay.”
“She didn’t. No matter how much I begged her to. Not for me, not for her daughter, not even for her own education. I don’t know where she is now.”
“I wish I could hug you,” Karl whines without realizing.
“Don't remind me,” Sapnap weeps.
Karl really wants a drink.
“Sapnap, it… this is such a… a weird situation for you to be in. You know that. But I need you to know that you didn’t really… do anything wrong. At least from what I’ve heard so far.”
“I literally cannot believe you are telling me that right now.”
“No, me neither, so you know I’m being real here. I don’t know if you’re a good dad or if you’re an asshole to other people over your baby because you haven’t told me anything since June. But I know you did everything you could to keep things under control until then.
“Sapnap, I need you to know that you’re good for that. You’re good for all the effort you put into this baby even before she was born. And if you still put that same amount of effort in for her now, then I know you’re amazing.”
There’s no guilt this time when he hears Sapnap sob. It’s sweeter, relieved. Like when Karl had handmade matching friendship bracelets and given Sapnap his bracelet. Even after a fight that left them in silence for a month.
Karl had told him he’d wait his entire life if it meant they would eventually make up and talk again. Sapnap had taken the bracelet and stared at it, started crying hard enough to shake his whole being, and hugged Karl tight enough to crush his ribs into dust.
Karl hasn’t felt a hug that gratifying since then.
“Do you wanna hear about her?” His answer is almost no, but the pronoun means something different when Sapnap says, “You know, after she was born.”
“I’d love to,” Karl finds himself replying.
“Um… She was born the twenty-seventh of July last year. I was with her mom in the hospital. She… she didn’t hold her. Didn’t want to at all, somehow. I thought pregnant ladies hated not getting to hold their babies. I don’t know.
“That meant that as her dad, I was the first one to hold her after all the doctors were done with her. Seven pounds, eight ounces. She was so small, a-and I had held babies before so I knew how to do it without hurting her, but I was still so scared to hurt her.
“She didn’t cry much. She cried when she was cold or hungry, but I really tried to keep her fed and warm. I think it paid off. She… liked me, I think.”
“You think? You were literally holding her twenty-four seven and taking care of her dirty diapers, how would she not have liked you?”
“I don’t fucking know, man! Babies are weird. They cry just to cry. If they don’t care why they’re crying, who’s to say they care who’s holding them?”
“Whatever. You were holding her, what then?”
“What then?” He makes it sound like the most meaningful question on the planet. “I couldn’t look away from her. All her little noises and movements were so… it was like I was watching a car crash, but in the best way, you know? Like she’d just crashed my whole world into the ground.
“Any time I looked at her or held her, I felt like I was holding the whole universe in my arms. I don’t think I’ve ever felt happier than when I held her for the first time.”
There’s no room for ache and jealousy in Karl’s heart as he feels the warmth of Sapnap’s joy engulf him.
“You love her a lot.”
“More than…” He pauses. Karl thinks he hears hesitation. “More than anything.” Even then, it’s still genuine.
Karl stops biting his tongue. “I’m sorry, Sapnap.”
“Wh… what? Why, what did…?”
“I owe you that much. Because you were the one apologizing earlier. I told you you hadn’t done anything wrong and I still swear by it. But I did. I got mad at you for not telling me about her as if I had any right to. You don’t deserve that. Not when this is how you are with her. No, wait. You wouldn’t deserve it even if you didn’t feel that way.
“I’m not judging you for anything that you did and I’m not going to. However you try to care for your daughter, I’m going to support you. Unless it’s, like, so bad that any ordinary person would find it weird. But I know you won’t get to that point, not even close. I promise you I’ll be here for you. From the bottom of my heart.”
“Geez, I get it.” Sapnap’s crying had lightened up before, but it’s back to heavy.
“Drink water. You’ve been crying too much to not be dehydrated by now.”
Sapnap doesn’t say anything, but a few seconds later he sets his phone down, so Karl assumes he must be getting water. He takes the time to talk some more.
“I just hope you can keep talking to me about this. This is huge. I know there’s so much more to this than you’re telling me. I don’t care if we start off small or go straight into it, but just… please don’t leave me alone again. I can’t—“ He stops himself. There’s no point in crying over this again, not when he’s so close to it being over. Deep breath. In, out.
“I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on with you. Whatever I can do that’ll make you trust me— rather, that’ll make me worth trusting, I’ll do it. But I need you to communicate. We both know this has been horrible. Let’s not make it worse.”
Sapnap doesn’t respond. Karl wants to tell him not to do this silence-until-you-start-crying shit again, but he hears a bottle cap being screwed.
“Okay. I’ll try. I will, really. I’ve wanted this for so long. But…” Karl braces himself. “Not yet. Not now, because we’ve been talking for a while now. I just… I need a little break. Sleep on it so I can talk more tomorrow. Tomorrow, okay?”
“I’m telling you, it could be any time this year and I’d still say yes.”
“You’re too good to me. Good to other people. Where the hell do you get the strength for that?”
“I think I was growing into it as a kid. You were like a growth spurt.”
The two are quiet for a moment. Now, though, Karl doesn’t want to fill the silence. He’s ready to let himself take a moment to process everything, to think and let himself rest after something so exhausting.
Relief.
Karl feels nothing but it.
It’s like a knot has been massaged out of his shoulder. The tension that had been killing him before, eating him alive and tearing him apart, had been kneaded in painful motions. But it got the job done. Now he feels free to move.
The static of the call is interrupted.
There’s a sharp wail.
High pitched. Small. Infantile.
“Shit, why doesn’t she stay asleep?!” Sapnap shrieks under his breath. “Karl, I-I have to go. We’ll talk tomorrow, b—“
That’s the last thing he hears, then the call beeps as it ends.
Karl stares at his phone screen in disbelief. The warmth slowly starts disappearing and turning into the same chill he’d always felt.
But his hope doesn’t disappear.
His hope is enough to keep him warm, and he can’t let go of his lifeline.
Upon checking the time, Karl realizes how late it is, and he starts getting ready for bed. He locks the front door, puts on his pajamas, grabs a glass of water to keep on his bedside table, and turns off all the lights.
When he settles into bed, he thinks something is missing. Something that needs to happen to complete the routine.
He opens his phone. He checks his call logs and stares at the call with Sapnap, now ended.
Ah.
He heads to their texts and types.
good night :] <3 sleep well, i know u need to
There. Now he can rest easy.