Count to Three: Part 3
Title: Count to Three
Part: Part 3 Ray
Author: l_s_d_me
Pairing: Brad/Nate; Ray and Walt
Ray inhaled sharply as it entered him, tearing through his blood and sucking at the oxygen. He felt the burn turn to bliss as he slumped back against his bedroom door. The wood cooled his flushed skin as his slid down to the floor. He sealed the small bag of white powder before tossing it into his closet. It landed directly in a shoe making him smile, looking smug for a moment before the regret set in. Ray wanted to be someone new, someone whose life didn’t involve this shit.
He tried to stop, a day here, two days there, but then the withdrawal would start to kick in and he couldn’t handle it. It was harder now with the guys around; he knew they could see it. Brad gave him nothing more than a look, like he was trying to freeze the part of Ray’s composition that needed drugs. Ray tried to make light of it by calling him Iceman, but it scared him to know that they could see through him. He always found comfort in Nate, no judgment on the surface, and seemingly none beneath; just a hand on the shoulder, a squeeze to know that it would all be alright. None of it became complicated until Walt got involved. Ray didn’t know how he did it, but he seemed to know everything - how Ray was feeling, and sometimes what was causing him to feel that way. He could see how some might find it unnerving, but it made things easier for him knowing that this was one person he wouldn’t have to struggle with. They could just be.
All in all, Ray found solace in the life he was living. He and Walt spent the morning hours, after Brad and Nate left to train, doing little things together like running, practicing hand to hand combat, sometimes shooting crossbows in the backyard. No pressure. And when Ray would start to shake or sweat would break out across his upper lip, Walt would put an arm around his shoulders and squeeze. “We’ll manage,” he would say, and it always helped.
But Walt wasn’t always there. And in the grey hours of the morning Ray couldn’t help but let the darkness take over. He could hear his father’s voice ringing in his head, telling him how useless he was. Often it was enough to make him curl up into himself. Sometimes Nate’s words would sneak in through the cracks: "You're more than you think you are, Ray,” only to be stamped back down by self-doubt. It would wash over him as his shaking hands dug through his drawer for his fix.
On most days Ray’s eyes would water as he got high. He told himself he wasn’t crying, but anyone watching him would have seen the despair on his face and the hatred he felt against himself bubbling to the surface. The days when it was worst he would be jolted back to reality by Walt banging on his bedroom door.
“Hold on a second,” Ray yelled each time, furiously wiping his face and jumping up and down a few times.
He would open the door to find Walt on the verge of tears, a scared look across his face. Sometimes they hugged, sometimes they didn’t, but they always stayed together for a couple hours at least. Walt wouldn’t leave his side, doing his best to keep him occupied; and for the most part it worked. It was just the nights that got him; the nights were the worst.
"I can only do so much for you," Nate told him a month into their training. They were sitting in the library with books and equations spread out in front of them. “You have to want to help yourself,” he said. Even though it was an obvious cliché Ray couldn’t even laugh at it. It was as if suddenly phrases like “Just be the best you, you can be,” were making him think. Still, none of it changed the gnawing he felt deep inside.
He could hide it though. He learned how through years of denial and attitude. And really, for the most part he succeeded.
His physical change in appearance helped; the muscle appearing where it hadn’t before and the weight that now hid the ribs that one could almost make out. They all ate regular meals, a lot of the times together. It was something Ray hadn’t known since he was a child, but more than that, it was new for him not to live off of coffee and coke. He felt stronger and more alive than he had in years. There were moments when confidence filled him and he was proud of himself. These moments usually came when he was working with Nate late into the night, after Ray solved a puzzle, or put together an object that had been a particular challenge.
“What is this?” Ray had said when Nate set down a box of parts in front of him.
“They’re electronic components,” Nate told him. “Put them together.”
That was all he said; not what it was, how many, or any advice on what to do. He just sat down at the table and began to read a book, occasionally looking up to watch Ray.
It took Ray four days to get it right. He worked for hours each day separating and analyzing the parts, laying them each out so as not to miss anything. Without knowing what he was doing he put them together back into perfect working order.
“What the fuck are these?” he asked Nate, holding both of them up in each hand.
“They’re called cell phones,” Nate said, taking one out of Ray’s left hand. “You can make phone calls from almost anywhere with them.”
Ray touched the buttons, accidentally taking a picture of his foot. “When are these from? Walt’s time?”
“No, after that. I got them in 2007 - the height of technology at the time.”
“Can we use them now? Here?” Ray asked as he pressed in his home telephone number.
Nate smiled at him and handed back the phone he held. “I’m afraid not, there aren’t towers here. No signal.”
“Then what are we supposed to do with them?”
Nate just shrugged, “I brought them here to see if you could work with technology you had absolutely no knowledge of. Keep them,” he said, patting Ray on the back. “They’re yours now.”
Ray turned them over in his hands, feeling the mixture of plastic and metal, the weight of them comfortable in his hands. “Thanks,” Ray said, feeling a bizarre sense of wonderment at these devices.
It was that wonder which pushed Ray to do more, to be better. It was his life now.
Sometimes Nate would turn up with something simple like a Rubik’s Cube. And other times he would walk in with a giant box of puzzle pieces, not telling Ray that there were an unknown amount of puzzles in there. Ray thought the worst was when he had to put together five and a half different maps of the Earth from one box.
“You have six hours,” Nate told him before sitting down directly across from him to watch.
And Ray did it. He always did it.
*
It was a Wednesday when Nate brought him the book. It was nearly falling apart at the seams when Ray picked it up off the table from where Nate had laid it down beside him. Nate looked more serious than he had in weeks.
"Song of Susannah," Ray read the title aloud.
Nate nodded.
"This isn't some book about chick who falls in love, has one of those fucking perfect lives and then suddenly dies from an incurable disease is it?" Ray asked, trying to bring levity to the situation.
"No Ray," Nate said. "It is not."
So much for that.
"Are you going to give me at least a hint?" Ray asked.
"This is important," Nate began explaining. "I need you to read this book closely, cover to cover as many times as you need to in order to find the information we need."
Ray was paying attention now, everything focused on this one book in his hands and the look on Nate's face.
"What are you looking for?"
"Two things," Nate said. "One: there's a coding in there that will tell us the location of the Cradle of Civilization. Two: We need a key to physically enter once we're there. This book describes that key."
He turned the book over in his hands, feeling the old pages, it felt thin to him. "Will it tell me where the key is?"
"No."
"How will we know where to look then once I figure out what it is?" Ray asked.
"Ka will show us," Nate said with finality; always believing that fate will show them the way.
The rest of the night Ray read the book. The first time through he marked nothing, just read. After that he started noting repeated words, cities mentioned, numbers, and odd phrases, anything that stood out. He stayed up all night reading it, and by the time the sun rose an entire notebook was filled from front to back. From his bedroom he could hear Brad and Nate moving around downstairs, as they got ready to go out for Brad's weapons training.
Ray listened for the car to pull away before heading down to the kitchen. He could see Walt sitting at the table chewing on a piece of toast from the stairs so he started running, hitting the linoleum in the kitchen and sliding in.
"Gooooood morning," he said as he slid behind Walt.
"Hey," Walt said with a smile, his face a little red.
"Are you blushing?" Ray laughed as he got coffee and sat down next to him.
"I was just in here with Brad and Nate," Walt began. "You know how they are."
Ray knew. It was obvious to anyone breathing that they wanted each other; and if it was obvious to everyone it was probably killing Walt.
"They should really just blow each other and get it over with," Ray said, scratching his temple.
Walt smiled, “You have such a way with words, Person.”
“Fuck yeah I do. I’m a literary genius, now. Deal with it,” Ray tells him with an exaggerated puff of his chest.
The look Walt gives him is one he sees a million times a day, but it still warms him to see it, to see that there’s at least one person who doesn’t, well, doesn’t hate him, at least not as much as he hates himself most days.
“So, Mr. Literary Genius,” Walt began. “What are you up to? You look like you’ve been up all night.”
He had.
“Nate gave me a book to read that is apparently fucking paramount to the whole fucking situation,” Ray said.
“Paramount?” Walt joked.
Ray leaned forward and points one of his fingers directly in between Walt’s eyes. “Literary. Genius.”
*
The next four hours consisted of nothing but reading and note taking. He thought he might be on to something, at least a general idea of where on earth they might find the Cradle and what the mysterious key is. But then he began to shake and couldn’t sit still for a minute longer. Everything kept leading back to numbers, and it didn't seem right to him. Walt was busy doing something across the room, writing in a notebook of his own and frowning.
Ray doesn’t approve of Walt frowning.
"I'm hungry," he said, scooting back from the table.
Walt looked up at him questioning and went back to reading. "Congratulations."
"Come help me make lunch," Ray said as he walked over to where Walt was sitting. "A big Italian you're-gonna-explode-from-all-the-food lunch."
"You're not Italian," Walt said, still not looking up from his work.
"I know you're not but what am I?" Ray taunted for no reason at all.
"What?" Walt finally looked up.
"What?" Ray said back before walking out of the room.
Ray was pulling noodles, sauce, spices, and bread out of the cabinet when Walt walked in. "I knew you couldn't resist," Ray said with a smile.
"I just don't want you to burn the house down," Walt told him as he seated himself at the table, situated so he could watch Ray cook.
"Aren't you going to help?" Ray said with a sudden pout.
"No."
But he did. They used canned sauce, but added so many different kinds of spices that it tasted completely different than it did to begin with; better than it did. When it got so hot it started boiling with large popping sauce splotches landing everywhere they added the noodles. Ray had insisted they use all the half boxes they had left in the cabinet from previous dinners. He mixed them all in while Walt put together garlic bread that was apparently a secret Hasser specialty; but what looked to Ray like nothing more than melted butter and garlic mixed together and applied generously to the bread before they put it in the oven to crisp.
The sound of Nate's car outside caught Ray's attention as he bent to take the bread out of the oven.
“Hey,” Ray said, picking up the hot pieces of bread and tossing them onto a plate as Nate and Brad walked in, just standing there looking at him. “I hope you don’t mind. I got hungry and this was all we had so deal with it, we’re having spaghetti for lunch.”
“No one’s complaining, Ray.” Nate said, and then let out a small laugh. “Though you are going to have to clean the sauce off the ceiling when we’re done.”
“How did you…?” Brad started but stopped. Ray turned to looked at him with a 'spit it out' expression when he saw Walt swaying a little on the spot, both of his hands holding on to Brad and Nate's chairs.
“Whoa...Have a bad session today, Brad?” Walt said with a wink. “It’s not quite the love fest it was this morning."
Ray nearly choked trying not to laugh. He was going to have to teach that kid to keep some things to himself. Brad looked like he was about to murder Walt, and Ray just couldn't have that. As Walt shuffled away from the table, back over to the stove where it was safer, Ray winked at him before grabbing the bread and began singing at the top of his lunch.
"TAKE ME ONNNNNN, take on me, I'll be gone, in a day or TWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO," he screeched in the highest note he could hit as he set the plate on the table.
Walt glanced at him thankfully while setting the pan of spaghetti down.
“Dig in,” Ray said, sitting down next to Brad and plopping a heaping pile of spaghetti onto his plate.
Lunch was quiet. Both Brad and Nate looked like they were trying so hard not to fuck each other right then and there that Ray thought they might all get pregnant from just being there while they stared at each other. Even Walt was beginning to blush, sensing their overriding feelings. As amusing as it all was to Ray, he was glad when they were finished and Nate and Walt went off to work.
Brad stayed, feet up on an empty chair, hands behind his head, and just watched as Ray climbed up onto a stool and tried to reach the sauce on the ceiling.
Ray had never feared for his life as much as he did at that moment, balancing precariously and cleaning. But of course, he always viewed cleaning as a fate worse than death, so maybe his views were a little skewed. Finally Brad got up.
"Move," he said as he hopped up on the table and started wiping the red off the ceiling.
Ray smiled and plopped down, moving to sit next to Brad's feet. He waited twenty seconds (he had counted) before breaching the subject of Nate.
“Why don’t you just admit you’re hot for daddy,” Ray said, expecting a firm kick.
“Shut up, Ray.”
“No seriously, dude. I’m not judging you. I saw him swimming the other day and almost got a halfie. I swear. I’d go gay for him faster than if Rob Lowe was standing there naked eating a steak.”
Sometimes Ray forgot he wasn't allowed to make references to people Brad had never heard of, but this wasn't one of those times. He was messing with Brad on purpose.
Brad squatted down, “That doesn’t make any sense. Were you dropped on your head as a child?”
Ray just beamed at him, an extra-large and toothy grin to try and hide the fact that he could feel the need for a hit starting to force its way to the surface. He very messily picked up a handful of plain noodles in his shaking hand and shoved them in his mouth. But he knew Brad had seen, he always saw.
*
"Motherfucker," Ray muttered to himself as he tore through his bedside table, though the bottom of his closet, and through every nook and cranny in his room where he ever once hid his stash.
It was all gone. Ray took a deep breath and tried to remember what he had done with it. He knew he had it three days before, the spaghetti day, but he could not remember the days between. Had he taken too much and blacked out, or was he simply working on decoding Song of Susannah the whole time and hadn't taken anything?
None of that mattered now, all he needed to do was find some, and find it fast. He could feel his stomach rolling with every breath he took. The panic set in about ten minutes later when every hiding place was exhausted and his skin began to feel like there was a small fire lit beneath it.
Fuck.
Shit.
Motherfucking shit.
And several more inventive and offensive curses flew through his brain and came out of his mouth before he could stop himself. He didn’t want this; well, he did, but it terrified him to his very core. What if they all let him die? What if Walt and Brad and Nate and everyone else who he’s known band together and throw him out on his own when they see what he’s really got inside of him. What if.
Walt was sitting on the floor outside of his room when he finally came out. When Ray looked down at him and it actually felt like his eyes were starting to sweat along with the rest of his body.
“Walt…,” he said, not able to get past the panicked worry.
Walt just nodded at him, quiet, almost fucking solemn and Ray wanted to punch him. He didn't need to hear it out loud - the admission that Walt snuck in and over a matter of two days took all of Ray’s drugs. He didn't want to hear it, hearing it would hurt.
“Did you take it?” he asked anyway because Ray never knew what was good for him.
“Yes,” was all Walt said before getting up from his seat on the ground and taking a hold of each one of Ray’s wrists. “You can do this; I’ll help you.”
But the worry had already set in. Walt’s words were too late to quell the synapses in his brain from shooting messages of frightened nausea back and forth.
That’s how the two of them ended up sitting on the front porch, a glass of water each, doing nothing at all but watching the sun come up. Brad had dragged Nate off into the desert that morning, early, so there wasn’t a sound anywhere but Walt’s steady breathing next to Ray’s catching his in throat every ten minutes. It was as if even the birds and insects were sitting in wait for when Ray’s walls would come crumbling down.
And they did crumble.
It started with Ray vomiting over the railing on the porch after Walt made him talk for an hour straight about the things he had learned while reading Susannah. His shirt was soaked through with so much sweat that it was becoming more of a hindrance than anything else, so he tore it off to wipe his mouth clean before sitting back down. Walt had tried to put a hand on his back, comfort him, but the feel of skin on skin made Ray shiver and he just pushed him away. The hurt look on Walt’s face only made him empty out the rest of his stomach into yet another bush.
"I need to go lie down," Ray swayed on the spot. "Don't follow me," he said to Walt as he moved passed him and into the house.
The sheets on his bed were cool to the touch when he collapsed onto them, blacking out almost immediately. When he woke up later, his gut was twisted and before he could stop himself he leaned his head over the side of the bed and heaved. There wasn't much of anything left in his stomach, but what was there landed in a bucket. Walt, he thought. Ray lifted his head to see a fresh glass of water and some aspirin sitting next to his bed.
"How do you feel?" a voice came from the corner.
Ray moved to see Walt standing there, looking relaxed.
"What did you say?" Ray asked, blinking his eyes to try and focus.
"I asked how you are?" his voice came harsher.
"I feel like dying," Ray whispered.
"Well...that can be arranged," Walt said.
Ray sat up just in time to see Walt pull a gun out of the band of his shorts. His eyes went wide as Walt smiled and pulled the trigger. He looked down at the blood seeping from his chest and could hear Walt laughing from the corner.
"Look at you!" Walt laughed out.
He began digging at his chest trying to get the bullet out, his hands covered in blood. "What the fuck, Walt?!"
Walt was still laughing.
"Walt...Walt...Walt!" Ray kept repeating, feeling the pain spread through his chest. "WALT!"
Ray shot up in his bed, the room dim in the evening sun. He scooted back on the bed so that he was flush against the wall. There wasn't blood, there wasn't a bullet hole, and Walt wasn't lurking in the corner with a smoking gun. Ray curled against his knees remembering the feel of having his best friend turn on him like that. It was all too much. He couldn't stay in his bed; he was dripping sweat and could feel spots on his face, arms and chest where vomit had stuck. A shower was all he needed, he decided. It took Ray a few tries to get out of bed and to the door.
His reflection in the mirror of the bathroom was pale and drawn. Ray flinched away from it, pulled off his pants and stepped into the shower. But the sensation of the water pelting off his skin wasn't soothing; it hurt, like actual physical pain. Out of reflex he jumped back from the spray; not even a second to brace as he slipped, hitting his head on the base of the tub.
Blackness.
Ray vaguely remembered Walt carrying him to bed, placing a towel on his forehead, a hand holding his and whispers in the night.
And then more blackness.
The blackness always returned.
"Ray?" he heard through the fog. "Ray...come on man, wake up." It was Walt's voice. Scared. "Ray!" he said stronger.
Ray realized he was shaking, his body jerking involuntarily. He could feel himself crying but there wasn't anything he could do to stop any of it. He shook, cried, yelled, and shook some more. The way Walt's hands gripped him was the only thing keeping him from slipping back into unconsciousness; the weight of them so sure.
His eyes shot open, obviously startling Walt with the abruptness of the move. Ray felt like he was breaking apart from the inside; a hand slowly and methodically moving to each bone and snapping it, strumming nerve endings like a guitar on its way. He bucked up. The scream that left his mouth didn't sound like it was coming from him, or anything human for that matter. Walt jumped on top of him to straddle his body in an effort to hold him still.
Ray heard a bang through the screaming, and then Brad was beside him with Nate hovering behind Walt. He thought he heard Brad say his name before the blackness took him over once more.
Time had no meaning to Ray during those days. Weeks. Months. He didn’t know when was when anymore. Sometimes he would wake up and hear bits of conversation pushing their way in through his ears.
"How is he?"
".........I don't know."
Then nothing.
"You should eat something."
"I can't stomach food yet."
Silence.
"Go. Sleep. I'll sit watch for a while."
"No, I won't leave him like this."
Pain.
Ray's mind wouldn’t allow him to differentiate who exactly was talking or what was going on. But he did know that Walt hadn't left him, not for more than a minute or two, which was the only thing certain in his life.
*
"This is more than visualization - you know that, right? She supposed she did. Something had changed her - had changed all of them. Jake had gotten the touch, which was a kind of telepathy. Eddie had grown (was still growing) into some sort of ability to create powerful, talismanic objects - one of them had already served to open a door between two worlds. And she?"
Ray awoke to these words being read out loud to him.
He let his head fall to the side and slowly opened his eyes to the light streaming in through his window. Walt was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to his bed reading the book Nate had given him to read, Song of Susannah. Ray let him continue, comforted by the steady sound of his voice washing over him, washing the past away.
"Objects," Ray said out loud, his voice thick.
Walt's eyes shifted up to meet his, a calm look on his face. "Objects?" he said, and Ray was grateful Walt was going with him.
"Susannah mentions objects...that's it," Ray paused, trying to wet his mouth. "It's an object."
"What...?"
"The key," a pause. "Doesn't look like a key," then another pause. "Something else."
And then he's sleeping again; a warm, quiet sleep.
*
The next time he woke up Nate was sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, his eyes focused out the window.
"I'm sorry," Nate said without even looking at Ray or truly acknowledging that he was awake.
"Why?" Ray croaked.
It's only then that Nate turned to look at him. His eyes were sad, tense, not something that Ray had seen before. It was almost frightening.
"For all of this," Nate took a breath. "For throwing this at you, but we need you alive, healthy. It's not just you anymore."
To say that Ray was confused would be an understatement. "I thought Walt said that he --."
"No," Nate cut him off. "It was my idea. He was worried you'd die and I agreed; fuck Ray, if you could have seen how you looked, when you started to shake...." Nate trailed off, running a hand over his head. "I should have been here; I meant to be here."
Nothing was making any sense. Ray wasn't ready for a conversation like this yet, he wasn't sure he was ready for anything yet. He felt like a cliché but everything was new now, new emotions, new thoughts, even his eyes felt new. And he wasn't mad. Part of him wanted to yell and scream and tell Nate to fuck off, but he couldn't. As lame as it was they had saved him.
"Nate," Ray said, scooting up in the bed. He was giving Nate a look that hopefully said "don't worry about it," and "thank you," and a million other things. But all he could do was nod and smile. And it was enough. Nate relaxed and Ray relaxed, that was it.
Out of the corner of his eye Ray saw Song of Susannah lying on his bedside table, left from when Walt had been reading it to him. Suddenly he remembered about the key and it all came flooding back to him.
"It's an object!" he said, startling them both out of the peace. "They key, Nate, it won't look like a key from the outside. It's connected to something else, some random ass object that could be anything."
Nate was staring at him with this weird smile on his face. "How did you figure that out? You've been in and out for...."
"Walt was reading to me. I woke up and he was reading, and it just clicked," Ray interrupted excitedly.
Nate looked at him in a way that made him feel like he was thinking about something else entirely now. When his eyes refocused on Ray he asked, "Do you know what the object is yet?"
Ray was about to answer when the door opened and Brad walked in, a big toothy grin on his face. "It lives!" he said coming to a halt beside Nate.
"You can't get rid of my ass that easily, Brad," Ray said.
And then Brad kept talking, which wasn't something anyone would correlate with Brad Colbert. He talked about what had been going on the past few days, about training, about Walt, even about the fucking weather. Ray listened to him, occasionally looking back at Nate who just sat there with a small curve of his lips. That's when Ray saw it; Brad's hand was on Nate's back, his thumb pressed to the side of Nate's neck.
"Oh my fucking God!" Ray said, cutting off Brad. "You two finally gave it up. Motherfucker's couldn't have waited until I was with it enough to cheer you on? Fuck. Does Walt know about this? Oh shit," Ray began laughing. "He probably feels like he got some too from all the tension being gone."
Ray kept laughing until his sides actually hurt. Well, everything hurt on his body still, but the sides were a definite side-effect of the laughing. It wasn't helping that Nate was trying very hard to look displeased with him while Brad was practically giddy. It was about that time Walt shuffled in, his hair mussed by sleep.
"What's goin' on?" he asked.
Ray ended up telling Walt a much exaggerated story about how Daddy and other Daddy were finally admitting their love for one another and soon, if they were lucky, there would be a baby coming along (because that's what happens when two people love each other). And then Ray started demanding details and timelines.
It was silent for almost a full thirty seconds before Brad broke. "So we were going out to the desert...."
*
But everything didn't just suddenly snap into place. Ray still felt it deep inside of him; the draw would bubble up beneath his skin in those dark quiet hours of the morning. He was getting better though. Often in the week and a half that followed he would pad down the hall to Walt's room and fall asleep on the carpeted floor in there. It made him feel better just to be with him; the drumming in his chest would quiet and he could breathe again.
Ray was working almost exclusively on finding out precisely what the key looked like, and where the Cradle was located that often times he would find himself losing hours, days even. When Ray hit a hard patch, the clues not leading him down the right path, or when he hit a dead end, instead of hiding in his room and getting high, he would hop down and do pushups, sit ups, anything to distract himself. What surprised him the most was that it worked.
It was one of those times when it hit him.
"Nate!" he yelled, running out of the house.
Nate was around the side, sitting in the shade of one of the trees. "Nate, Nate," Ray urged, running up to him, but he didn't look up. When he reached him, Nate's eyes weren't focused, his breathing shallow. Ray stood transfixed looking at him. It still weirded him out to see Nate like this; part of him somewhere else.
"Nate," he whispered. "Come back."
It took a couple minutes, but then there Nate was, green eyes blazing again and focused on Ray's face. Nate reached his arms up and stretched as if he had just woken up. Ray let him go through this routine before he began talking.
"What is it, Ray?" Nate asked, his fingers flexing in the grass.
"I figured it out.... the location." Ray was practically bouncing on the spot.
"Show me," Nate said.
They rushed back into the house, Ray explaining to him on the way.
"They were numbers. I kept coming back to sets of numbers. In the book some of them are lucky, some of them are cursed. There were key words that didn't connect other than page numbers. It wasn't fucking clicking," Ray said, gesturing wildly with his hands as they pushed up the steps to his room. Nate was right there with him, his face focused, his eyes almost wild. They stopped right outside the door and Ray turned to him. "They're coordinates, Nate."
"Coordinates," Nate repeated him after Ray handed him the paper he had written them on. "Have you figured out the location yet?"
Ray smiled. "I'm not that backwards. I can read a fuckin' map."
He reached behind him and grabbed the open map book on his bed. The room seemed to still as he passed it to Nate: Opened to page 816. The Middle East. The former Iraq circled in black pen. Coordinates of 33 degrees, 20 minutes, 18 seconds Latitude / 44 degrees, 23 minutes, 38 seconds Longitude. Baghdad.
*
“Baghdad,” Brad said, moving his mouth like he was tasting the word on his lips.
Ray watched them all take in this news. He actually felt pride in himself, in something he had done. Walt was sitting by his side on the couch, both of them sitting cross-legged with their knees touching. It was still obvious at times that Walt wasn't used to being touched so much, but Ray couldn't help it. There was something about Walt that made him feel better; it stamped down the pain when it tried to rise. It wasn't like what Brad and Nate had, that was something of its own. No, what Ray felt was a different sort of bond through blood and life binding them together; a life that Ray hadn't known existed.
"How will we get there?" Walt asked, his question catching Ray's attention.
"I will take us," Nate said. "Like I brought you here."
They all nodded.
"Can we just zap right to the Cradle?" Ray asked.
"It won't be that easy. The Cradle is veiled in such a way that one must approach it on foot," Nate explained to them. "We'll only know the way when we're walking; ka will show us."
Walt nudged Ray with his elbow and looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Ray was trying not to smile and could see that Walt was doing the same. In the past couple weeks they had started to point out to one another each time Nate mentioned ka, fate showing them their way. It was just another thing that helped Ray keep distracted.
"So all we need now is the key?" Brad asked.
"That's right, Brad," Nate said, nodding and giving him the tiniest of smiles.
Ray rolled his eyes.
"How close are you to figuring out what it is?" Nate turned to Ray.
"I think I've got a pretty good picture of what it is, but it doesn't make much sense," Ray said, with a shrug. "Like that's new."
"Describe what you can," Nate said, his eyes bright. Ray hadn't told anybody this yet; he had only halfway figured it out that morning.
"I know this makes no fucking sense," Ray started. "But I almost think it's the world with a giant eagle on it...," he trailed off. "I know, I know, but it's like, smaller. Maybe a globe...."
Walt was stock still beside him, his face white.
Part 4