Author's Note: Apparently rambling is good for the soul. Or for my writers block. Whichever one. And if you can guess who I am talking about in this tale of mine, then hurrah for you. (By the way, the only way I'll be able to tell is if you review…hint hint.)
If, by some measure of time, you come up with a pair that does fit this story's criteria and yet I was not talking about them at all, then feel free to tell me. I might congratulate you. If your propitious enough in your endeavors.
Disclaimer: Once, there was a little girl who spent her time reading and writing about a world so wonderful and different that she fell in love; with the plot, the scenery, the location, and its characters. She would have been even happier, if she had happened to own its copyrights. But she didn't, so now she wastes her time here, with you lot.
Apocalypse
"Throughout our years together, we had built up a historyand a closeness so subtle we didn't even know it was there." –Erma Bombeck, b. 1927
"It's coming." she said, still not looking up from her morning paper. The blatant sound of a motorcycle blaring down the declivity of their street came and went, fading into the distance. An oppressive silence followed as she read the paper, not really wanting an answer yet waiting for one.
"What's coming?" he had still not looked up from his cup of coffee. He had not stirred as the motorcycle had roared into their ears and out the other side. But he spoke with a kind of weariness one gets when putting up with a body for so long it makes you think ludicrous things, such as thinking the daily vicissitudes he went through were not out of the norm.
"It." her answer was not spoken, really. In reality it was only festooned by the sound coming from her mouth; it alone was a tactic response that did not need a vocal cord to produce.
"Do you mind explaining? At all?" he said, a hint of sarcasm fused with his lack of appreciation for mornings. He glowered at her still raised paper. It hid her head from view, and he wished to give some expressive form of recrimination, if only to make sure she knew he was looking at her with a sullen and sulky appearance.
She nodded from behind the paper; he didn't see. However he supposed she did, from her lack of response and the slight upward movement of the paper, so that he sat and waited for her to get tired of the silence and answer. After a while, when his switching between glaring at the paper, and twirling a spoon through his coffee mug got tedious she spoke. "The Apocolypse."
"Come again?" he said; now for once looking at the spot were her eyes would have been. She placed the paper down solemnly, her eyes meeting his.
"The Apocolypse. Rumor has it its coming." She said, eyes blinking unemotionally, voice dry as she reached demurely and yet mockingly for his coffee mug and took a sip.
He pretended not to notice. "Really?" He leaned with his elbows and started to doodle on the front cover of the paper. A corpulent fly fizzed by and he wondered where it got all its food from, and whether he should snatch it.
"Yes. Everyone says so." She smiled whimsically and leaned back in her chair.
"Is this an Everyone, with a capital E?" he mildly rebuked, mouth giving a hint of a smile before he frowned once more.
"Yes, capital and all," she said, before remarking, "You're not a morning person, are you?"
"What gave it away?" he asked irritably, before he snatched his now empty mug back. He cleared his throat before getting up to fill it again from the pot on the stove. "Did you know, I always fancied myself an Apocalypse."
She wondered how he managed to saunter so much in the three feet between the kitchen table and the stove and counter. "You fancied an Apocalypse? How droll. Did it love you back?" she smirked slightly, a rather foreign expression to her face that anyone else would have found odd.
"No, idiot. I fancied myself as an Apocalypse. Rather a retched tyke, I was." He sat back down with a contented sigh as he took another sip from his now full coffee mug. He sniffed and made a face at the acrid taste of it, and added a spoon of sugar.
"Oh. Were you that bad? You know, sometimes I come home and find your clothes on the floor. Did your mother kill you eventually?" She smirked from beneath her brow absentmindedly as she started to twists little pieces of paper napkin off, and line them up like a cordon along a highway.
"If she did, then you'd be talking to a dead person." He paused to look at her row of twisted-paper-napkin and wondered whether his father's epaulettes looked like that when he and him where in their younger days. He was very young when his father wore them to celebrate glory and power, and some not to fond of its meaning.
"I always wanted to talk to a dead person." She snickered quietly as a sudden breeze scattered her little cordon line and sent them off in the air, quavering and hovering over the floor for an age before they tumbled softly to the ground. "Someone will have to pick that up." she thought.
He snorted. "Talking to a dead person? You'll get your chance if this Apocalypse thing works out. Plenty of 'em to die, you know?" he grimaced at her less than crestfallen face.
"Men are horrible. You're horrible. But I did want to talk to a dead person," she paused again, looking out the window, "I wonder what an Apocalypse would be classified as?"
"People dying?" he sniggered, "Just going out on a limb here." He put down his cold coffee, and looked out the window. "An earthquake? The earth splitting? Your books catching on fire." He sniggered again and brushed a cat hair off his sweater. Her bloody cat didn't seem to get the hint that he was impervious to its shedding. And yet he still found them scattered along his clothes. He sniggered again.
"You know," she sniffed, "I like your smirk better than your snigger. You sound like a pig when you snigger. It's unbecoming."
"You getting up at four in the morning to check on your library is unbecoming."
"No, its safe." She glared mutinously at him. He only broke out in a grin.
"Cracked that's what it is." He patted her hand fondly and leaned back as well.
She mumbled something inarticulate before replying, "And I suppose watching a nine hour marathon of James Bond on the telly is not?"
He scowled as he realized his insistence on her comments being ineffectual had been wrong most of the time. "He's not cracked. He's bloody cool."
"He's a pig." She inspected a nail.
"You're a pig. And he's not."
"He's a womanizer!" she pointed a finger at him and raised an eyebrow before believing she made her point, and lowered her finger.
"He is suave. Don't be jealous." He made a jeering face at her before sniggering once more.
"He's a muggle, I hope you realize. It's a muggle thing. So is the telly." she gazed at his inscrutable eyes, before pursing her lips for him to continue.
"So?" he mumbled something again, "he's a cool muggle."
She grinned with ebullience at his statement on muggles and sat back, this time fingering her hair. She wondered whether their kitchen conversation could get any weirder.
"It's a tirarde, that is."
She snorted at her last thought and his question. "What is?"
"You're hair. It's amazing really."
"How is my hair a diatribe?"
"It just is, it offends me." He grinned as she opened her mouth to protest before she realized he was only kidding.
She gazed back at him and seated her chin in her hands. "What happened to our enmity?'
"It's vanished I suppose. Maybe." He stopped for breath, "It faded a while back. Well, more than that. When you live with someone for forever, you kind of change. But we still retain our differences, you know. And our discrepancy. I guess, when you think about it, we do sort of create a tumult of our own, though. Here."
"At the kitchen table. But what happened, you know?" she folded her arms and looked at him with puzzlement.
"I don't bloody well know. Women." He sighed before realizing he had another question. A dangerous question, when you figure who you are asking. He wondered whether he wanted to know the answer. He breathed in deeply before rushing into the one inquiry that would lead them back to the beginning and the enormity of their looming future. "Why is It?"
"It?"
"Yes, It. Why?"
"It is the Apocalypse." She snorted again and began to pick up another section of the paper.
"No. I mean, why is It happening?"
She had once again hidden her head in the folds of the news, and he once again glowered as he waited for an answer.
"Apparently, the Apocalypse is happening—"
"Yes?"
She did not pull her head out of the paper to answer, and she didn't so he couldn't see her smile.
"It's happening because according to them, we're in love."