Gilga is chronically actively suicidal and has tried way more than 25 times in my hc
So quiet that even the wind sounded like sand scraping against the eardrum.
They were both on the balcony.
Nodt sat on the ground, hands gripping the railing, legs dangling outside, swaying in the air.
Gilga leaned against the railing, an unlit cigarette between his lips, eyes drifting toward the sliver of new moon in the sky.
There were no signals of collapse in the air. No processed emotions. Only one of them suddenly spoke—voice even, like cold metal dropped into a tank of water.
“I won't say that I'm alive... I'm just not dead yet.”
He said it without emphasis, without tremor, without pause. As natural as stating the temperature. As if it had been chewed a thousand times inside him before he let it out.
Nodt didn’t move. He wasn’t surprised.
He just turned his head slightly, glanced at Gilga, then slowly let his gaze drift forward again.
The air seemed to sink a little.
He didn’t reply right away. Even he was silent for longer than usual, as if the words hadn’t been said to him, but simply thrown into the balcony space to see who’d be the first to pick them up.
The silence held for five, six seconds.
Long enough to feel like a short dream.
Then he spoke. Voice soft, emotionless, even slightly water-soaked and hoarse:
“Death......really isn’t an easy thing.”
A second passed. He added, as if finishing the sentence:
“...Especially when people are looking for it.”
It wasn’t a gentle “don’t be like this.”
It was like a sheet of glass pressed in front of Gilga’s eyes—
not an answer, but a temperature to perceive.
Gilga didn’t say anything. He just kept the cigarette in his mouth, eyes dropping to Nodt’s knuckles wrapped around the bars.
Then his mouth twitched—almost a smile, almost too tired to keep talking.
The light was still on, but no one had touched it in a long time.
Only the two of them were left in the air—
one standing, a cigarette hanging from his mouth;
the other sitting between the rails, hair damp, shoulders slack.
His brow raised slightly—not in amusement this time,
but like he had just caught something—
A way of speaking too calm, too familiar.
Not someone quoting a story.
Someone who’d been there.
He didn’t think too much—
the words came out on their own.
Just a beat-late recognition:
You weren’t talking about someone else.
You’ve walked that line too.
Nodt didn’t look up right away.
He was quiet for two seconds,
as if confirming: so we’re really going there, huh.
Then he lowered his head, as if sinking back to a dream—eyes falling to the void and height under his dangling feet.
So low it didn’t even sound meant for Gilga.
More like he was speaking to the versions of himself that hadn’t died.
“I've...been on that edge for too long.”
In that moment, he wasn’t Nodt.
Not the one who puked on you, licked your mouth,
not the one whose need for control bit through everything.
He was someone who had once been trapped—
by a hospital bed, by convulsions, by bitten lips and a throat that wouldn’t open.
His head bowed, fingers pressed to the railing,
like feeling for the bars of a cell he never escaped.
Then he said one more thing,
“Human body......truly is amazing.”
Just a joke told by someone too tired to laugh—
The kind of joke you make when you’ve tried to die
and your body just keeps refusing.
At the way his neck looked like a taut string about to snap.
The light hit Nodt’s shoulder,
and it looked like he was still folding inward—
like someone who’d “walked too long” hadn’t quite made it back.
Gilga’s breath came a little uneven.
He didn’t cough, didn’t sigh, didn’t curse.
He just said, low and hoarse,
“......Tell me about it.”
Like stepping onto the same soil where he once buried something. And now someone else stood there, too.