In isolation, everything that isn’t important melts away. The man’s name was one of the first things to go. Out in the woods, there’s no one to use it. His identity grew apart from the human label, and the shed name fell to the ground like an antler in early spring. So much of his mind is dedicated to survival, to finding food and shelter and existing in the forest around him, that superficial things like names are a distant memory from a distant lifetime.
The name is the first word to leave, but many others follow. Who is there to speak to? At first he mumbles to himself, but gradually his voice grows more ragged with disuse and the words trickle away one by one. He stops thinking in words; his thoughts are mere pictures and sensation and reaction. Occasionally he will stumble across some old human refuse in the woods and a brightly-colored block font on a label will remind him, briefly, synapse firing like a shooting star, “Oh yes, language.” And then it will be gone again, discarded as unnecessary.
He found an old mine, near the beginning, long abandoned. A one-room wooden office building sits just outside the mouth, a squat guardian. It became his nest, lined with soft bits of found fur and feathers, a little haven. He defends it from other animals that try to intrude, mostly by posturing but also with force when necessary. There are enough old and rusted tools in the mine that can be dangerous when used with intent.
It’s not that he has no access at all to civilization. There is a campground, a series of hiking trails, if he goes far enough to the southeast. He knows this, but uses this knowledge mostly to avoid chance meetings. It’s been long enough that he hardly remembers why he abandoned the rest of humanity in the first place. But he has no desire to make contact save for the occasional theft of unsecured food. Might as well: if it wasn’t him, it would be a bear. Campers need to know to hang up their goods. At least he doesn’t wreck their tents searching for more.
What he can use, he takes. What he can’t take he finds or constructs for himself. It is amazing how little one actually needs, all things told. Warmth in the cold. Shelter from the rain. Food. Clean water. The forest provides, if you know where to look.
Fishing is one of the simplest routes to protein. At certain times of year the fish are so plentiful one can wade into the stream and snatch them up with bare hands. He is still in the water, feeling it flow around his calves, watching and waiting like a patient heron, when he hears it.
A child’s laughter. The sound is alien at first; he hasn’t heard it in years. When would it have been? Decades, perhaps? There’s something haunting about it. It pierces his brain with a raw and painful longing. He does not understand. He moves towards the sound furtively, silent.
There is a boy in the clearing, and a father. They are dressed as tourists to the forest. They are fishing together with fancy, gratuitous equipment, shiny with lack of use. Their heads are bent together as the father demonstrates some intricate knot to the boy, fastening a plastic line to a hook. He hears the father call the boy “Nao.”
The father’s back is to the man hiding in the dappled undergrowth, but he can see the son’s face. A child, still round with youth, dark-haired and wide-eyed, a lanky childhood mix of gangly limbs and soft, plump curves. He looks tousled but bright, focused.
There is a strange hyper-reality to the boy. Seeing him, the man feels another life loom behind him like a cloak about to be dropped upon his shoulders. Another time. Another place. Another family. In this boy are all the dropped shards of the man’s former life, the useless accouterments of humanity that he had long left to gather moss on the forest floor. Suddenly they surround him again, strange and shining and close enough to touch if he dares.
The boy looks up.
The man shrinks back into the forest. Was he seen? Unclear. The boy stares for a lingering moment in his direction, but eventually turns his attention back to his father’s instruction. Relieved, the man retreats. Waits. Considers.
He follows the two back to their campsite that evening, trailing behind like one stalking a deer, careful not to make a sound. He doesn’t approach, unsure of his own motives, simply watching. He has no words to ask questions or voice his intentions, even to himself. All he feels is the essence of waiting. Patience. A feeling of the future in the air.
Night falls. He smells the change in the air, hears the daytime guard replaced by night; chirps and croaks filling the forest. The woods are never quiet, never fully at rest. Darkness comes quickly here, as the overhead boughs block the swiftly-fading light. His eyes adjust gradually to the new dimness.
Time passes. Individual units of time have little meaning to him anymore. Night settles comfortably over the forest like a blanket. He shivers.
An artificial sound. The door to the tent unzips. The boy, Nao, emerges, clad in drowsiness and a long T-shirt. Zips back up behind himself. He carries a flashlight, his eyes unused to full darkness. He walks a short way into the woods and pulls down his underwear to take a leak.
The man hadn’t realized it until now, but this is what he’s been waiting for. He pads stealthily towards Nao from behind. Stops when a twig snaps under his foot. The boy looks around, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered. The man resumes his approach.
Just as Nao finishes up his urination, the man strikes. He puts a hand over the boy’s mouth to stop him screaming and lifts him bodily, leaving his underwear behind and dashing away with him into the woods.
Nao squirms and protests, trying to get away. He is like a caught fish, a struggle to hold, but the old man of the forest has much experience with slippery fish. He keeps the boy tight in his arms.
Unsure where else to go, he brings the boy to the mine. The cavern is wide, spacious, and echoes with the boy’s protests.
The boy’s skin is startlingly soft. The man has not felt a texture like this in longer than he can remember. It gives beneath the rough calluses on his fingers, dimpling under pressure. He runs his hands all over the boy’s body, savoring the surreal smoothness of it.
The man wears little in the way of clothing; a hanging panel of hide protects his vulnerable nethers from the pokes and scratches of forest brush, but that’s it. It takes very little for him to be skin to skin with the boy, curved around him like the hard shell of a vulnerable seed. He surrounds the child, holding them both on their knees, arms locked tightly around the boy as his hands continue to roam.
He feels his cock stir at the contact, and ruts it along the crack of Nao’s behind in uncoordinated huffing breaths of movement. His member slides along the soft flesh, tantalizingly mild in its friction. Instinctive, hard, the man thrusts further forward, angling his straining member between the large, luscious globes of the child’s rear. He feels the head fetch up against the small orifice nestled there.
He thrusts, nudging himself against the hole, mind full of blank instinct. But it does not go in; the dry friction makes it painful to do more than butt his impatient head up against the tight pucker of muscle. He thrusts this way until his cock is so stiff that it aches, desperate to move in a direction that the man vaguely remembers through a hazy fog.
But physics is something that he does remember. The physical reality of his surroundings are his only remaining intimate companion; he knows how things will slide, will catch, will fall.
He turns the boy around. Nao is crying, is pleading a non-stop string of protests in words the man hears only as a vague sort of background noise. With his rough, stained fingers, the man holds the boy’s mouth open, finds it wet and welcoming, and pushes his cock inside. With the boy’s protests muffled in this way, he spits into his own hand and begins the patient process of working what moisture he can into the boy’s hole with his fingers.
As he does so, the contrast of his own skin against the boy’s is startling to him. They are different in every conceivable way; he darkly tanned to the boy’s paleness, the texture rough to the boy’s soft, old and gnarled against the pristine smoothness. His own appearance is something the man has not considered in a long time; one of the many parts of himself long lost. There is no one to look at him, nowhere to see his own face save a brief rippling reflection in a river on a sunny day. It has been so long since he has considered such a thing: what must he look like to this boy?
It is a remarkably idle thought to a mind unused to idleness. He sticks a wet thumb up the boy’s ass and works it in and out patiently, adding more spit as needed until it squelches wetly. Good enough. He takes his cock out of the boy’s mouth from where it was plugging up his protests and turns him once more.
He coats the boy like a liquid, draping himself over Nao’s back, and slides his cock up into him. Truth be told it’s not much smoother than before, but what little lubrication their mutual saliva offers is just enough. His member sinks into the boy, deep, deep, deep, as deep as he can go until he feels like he has the boy fully surrounded, covered inside and out.
It feels strangely like a hollowness in him has been filled, rather than the other way around. Something old and dusty and forgotten returns to him, fading back into his reality. He begins to thrust, fucking the boy.
Nao’s cries echo through the mine, wordless now but still clearly protests. The man strangely wishes the boy would speak again; he wonders if this newly-awakened part of him might not understand the words in a way he didn’t before.
But the animal need is stronger than the human desire, and his hips continue relentlessly. He thrusts and thrusts and thrusts, each time burying himself as deep inside the boy’s body as he can. Ecstasy pulses through him. He is gripped by tightness and warmth and velvety softness. The boy’s name rises to his lips, a hoarse prayer from a disused throat: “Nao Nao Nao” as a ceaseless whisper.
Eventually he comes inside the boy. But he cannot bear to let him go. He waits, clinging tightly to the boy as they both shudder, his softening member slipping sheepishly from the boy’s hole. He holds him and waits. And waits. And waits until he is hard once more and can once again push his way into the warm haven of the boy’s rear orifice, fucking him anew.
The second time is slower, less desperate. It takes longer. When he comes again he holds the boy’s hips close to drive the pulses of his sperm as deep into him as he possibly can. It feels like a gift. A thank-you, perhaps, for this strange awareness of himself that Nao seems to have awakened.
Nao escapes while he sleeps, fallen exhausted on the floor of the cave, unable even to make it back to the little nest of his home. It doesn’t matter. Even if the boy can find his way back to the campsite, there is little chance of him managing to retrace his steps to come back here. And even if he could, the man has a great deal of experience at not being caught in these woods. He is not concerned.
Instead he lies on his back, staring at the rocky ceiling of the mine. He listens to the sound of the rain beginning to pit-pat on the ground outside and tries to summon up the memory of his name.