Only If For a Night(MxM)

Ontario

The man that handed Jet the keys to the tiny cabin he had rented was old in the neighborly sort of way, wrinkled face, and a baseball cap probably had a grandson named Billy and liked Old Westerns.

There were more trees here than Zuko had ever seen. His whole life, he had hardly ever seen the horizon or a sky not shrouded by buildings, even in Japan. Here, no cars honked their horns; there was no such thing as smog, the nearest big city an hour away.

It took twenty more minutes to get to the cabin from the main office.

"OH MY GOD," Zuko squawked as a bear lumbered in front of them, not two hundred feet away.

"Is that a bear?"

"Yes?" Jet replied, throwing him a confused look.

"They're a lot smaller than I thought they would be," he was still frowning.

"Okay, well, try and see how that reasoning works out for you when the four hundred pound thing is gnawing on your face. I'm sure it'll remind the bear that it 'needs to be smaller'"

Zuko mocked him in a high-pitched voice.

The back of the Subaru held their bags. As shocking as it might sound, there are no adaptable charging stations for Teslas out in the middle of the woods in the Ontario wilderness. They rented the Subaru, and the second Zuko signed the papers, they left the dealership, Canada bound.

It was well over six hours to their destination, a small cabin in the forests of Kingston.

Jet could smell the air getting cleaner.

The last mile of their journey, he rolled the windows down all the way, the cold damp air invading the cab. This was not something you did in the city unless you wanted to let in the exhaust of the eighty cars around you. It was also, somehow, an open invitation for homeless people to come up and talk to you. The only time Jet could remember rolling down car windows that ended with him being happy was when he went through fast-food lanes.

Zuko was about to protest when he heard it.

The silence.

The absolute silence of the forest, that wasn't really all that quiet, but it was the best sort of noise.

The tires ground on the gravel, and beyond that, the birds chirped, and the trees whispered together; the ferns hushed them gently.

Zuko closed his eyes and inhaled the forest.

It hadn't been that hard to arrange it all; Jet had the police tell his mom that he was leaving, in case the stalker had somehow tapped his phone or followed him. He would have had to take the Tesla anyway; his bike was still totaled. There was no hope left for it.

The driveway was just two tracks carved into the forest floor, tracing up and to the right past the trees.

"Longshot would hate this," Jet commented, eyes wide at all the trees.

"He would try and fight the first porcupine he saw, and our little vacation would be cut a few days short,"

Zuko grinned.

"Smellerbee would love it, though. She always loved it when I would take her to Central Park. We'd spend hours carefully smelling each tree,"

The way he phrased it made it sound as though he was partaking in the tree sniffing activities, and that made Jet smile.

"And Longshot? What did he think of the trees?"

"He made me carry him the whole time, so I'll let you decide,"

The tiny path finally ended, and there sat the cabin. It was small, smaller than Zuko had ever considered a house could be, but it was beautiful. It was everything that he thought it would be, but corporeal.

"Do you think those antlers are real?" He nodded up to the elk antlers fastened above the door.

"Looks like it,"

They sat in the car for a few moments, letting the engine run idle.

"The owner said that there's a lake about a mile west through the woods if we want to go check it out,"

Zuko nodded. "I didn't bring my life jacket,"

"You'll be fine,"

The two of them watched a woodpecker land on the side of the cabin and gave them an indifferent look before skittering off into the trees.

"Should we go in?" Zuko whispered.

"Yeah, probably," Jet sighed and rolled up the windows.

Zuko sure did pack light for a rich kid. A smidge of Jet's mind had expected that he would have to tell him to leave half of it behind, but Zuko barely packed enough to fill his suitcase. Most of his clothes had been touched or worn during the break-in. He had refused to touch them. Jet couldn't blame him.

They had made a pitstop in Syracuse at a Target for him to nonchalantly blow almost three hundred dollars on different clothes for the weekend, along with toiletries. Jet had bought a few things too, but Zuko's casualness with expenses had shined through at that moment, because the second that Jet's back was turned, he swiped his card and paid for it all. It hadn't escalated into an argument, because Jet was beginning to understand how little Zuko understood about paying for someone else.

The discussion had gone like this:

"Why didn't you let me pay for that?"

"You were too slow,"

"I can pay for my own stuff," he had huffed.

"I know you can," Zuko reassured, stuffing the bags into his suitcase. "If you really want to pay me back for a stick of deodorant and a pack of socks, go ahead, I guess,"

He slammed the trunk shut.

Jet thought about this while he hauled the bags into the cabin, dumping them in the foyer before walking straight back out.

Zuko had held the door open for him and was still outside; his neck craned back to look at the trees.

"I can't hear a single car," He whispered. Jet nodded.

There were some places like that in Afghanistan. Stretches of nothing but silence, just the murmur of wind on the sand. It had been pretty unnerving for a city boy.

"It'll take some getting used to," he reassured.

"How long are we going to be here?" He was still whispering as if the sound of his voice would break some spell, and the woods would descend into the chaos of Madison Square.

"A week, give or take. At least, that's what the cops told your work you would be gone for that long,"

"Where did they say we were going?"

"Florida, on vacation."

Zuko nodded sagely, eyes still locked on the boughs of the maple above. "I'd sooner cut off all of my hair than go any more southern than Delaware,"

Jet laughed.