Smiling Hurts
Volume, Mass, Density. But most of all, Chemistry.
SasuSaku
heavenlyhuntress
Distinction is the consequence,
never the object of a great mind.
-Washington Allston
Raindrops falling from the sky, she thought, and the sky suddenly ripped open and poured from its bosom torrents of rainwater.
It poured onto her new orange camisole, over and underneath the thin material, and through it, too, deadening it down with added water weight.
But she didn't open her eyes, because if she did, thoughts of him would just drift away from her mind into the drain, where the water was slipping into. No. She needed to keep all thoughts of him to herself, because he was all she thought about, her back-up for a thought process. After a math problem, after a science question, her brain switched automatically to him. It was like auto-pilot without controlling when.
So she shut her eyes, tight.
--
The day he worked with her in the science lab was, incidentally, the day he told her the first piece of truth about himself.
"I like black spiders," he told her, unwillingly. That day at the lab, drawing pennies into the graduated cylinder, was like a little spot off heaven of her own, with him. It seemed only where they were working, it was sunny, bright. Capricious, whimsical. It had been happy.
She smiled at the thought, then, but because smiling made her cheeks painful, she rested her cheek muscles back into a frown. A sob was punctured halfway through.
The next day when they had graphed their results of the penny's mass to volume he had asked her what the slope on the graph meant. She had secretly wondered the same thing but had been too shy to ask, and told him she didn't know. He grabbed her paper and his and proceeded to the front of the room, where he asked the teacher. When he returned to their seats she jokingly said - albeit a little shyly - she had known it all along - mass over volume represents density.
He'd told her she'd made him look like an idiot.
She laughed; he joined in. She talked about classes and work and grades with him and he complied. But it always seemed as if he had something else to say, something deeper than the usual high school chatter. Something lasting, something he'd wanted to say for ages.
--
And then he'd died that day, and she'd never known.
--
But she had chances. Plenty of chances, to tell him that she had loved him - it had been on the tip of her tongue all along. "Like the words are the bottom of the iceberg and your tongue is the tip, right next to the things you meant to say," quoted her little cousin, framing the situation perfectly. And the older sister had nodded glumly and retired to her room earlier that day, mulling over what-could-have-been's and what-I-should-have-done's.
All day. Plenty of chances. The whole semester with him. The whole science periods watching his dry little smile, seeing him dressed up differently every day - and some days where he dressed the same twice in a row, at which he shrugged off and said that he'd been drunk (or something) last night and hadn't noticed.
She always wondered what went on with his life. She knew that school, although taking up 7 hours and a little more than a half of one's daytime, said so little about someone. She wondered how he was at home - if he loved his mother, if he ever fought with his brother. She wondered all this while looking at his face every day in science class.
She traveled to so many places while she sat in the dingy little science room looking at his face.
--
Yet sometimes she thought he understood, too. There were, at times, when he'd stop holding the balance as she dropped a penny or two, rolling off onto the table. He'd say, here, and envelope the change with his large hands. His accent was fabulous. He'd been in the district for little over than two months but his accent was fabulous. And she wondered if he knew other languages. He was genius (and yet not Asian. How did that work? She wondered this most of all).
And then at those times he looked at her, truly looked at her, and she stopped worrying about her clouded-looking eyes behind the misted goggles, and her hair, haphazardly pulled up before the lab's mandatory rules, and her glasses underneath her goggles, because she'd put her contacts away (another one of the lab's dumb rules).
Yet she thought he accepted her.
--
He had kind black eyes. He always did. Scrutinizing a friend's lab sheet with eyes that had above perfect vision (even with her contacts her vision failed to rival that of his), his brows drawn together and nearly touching but not quite, separated by a pre-mature wrinkle between his eyes.
His wrinkles were beautiful, really.
--
Three days after the pennies lab, he died.
But the day that he died, his wrinkles really showed.
They say that when someone dies, he looks asleep, he looks truly at peace. But either the workers hadn't placed too much time in arranging his facial features, or his very face muscles were rigid and hard in that expression, but his frown never faded. It looked like his cheek muscles would hurt and stretch and mutilate if he attempted a smile.
When he was alive, she thought, his smile was bright, his teeth white and perfect and healthy. What is it, she thought, that makes the eyes go slack and lose their reflection, that makes the muscles never again worked from the person himself? For he would never use his body again, because his soul had fled, into some remote cranny in the outreaches of the universe.
She wouldn't find him ever again, as long as she lived. Try as she might, she might as well fail. She might as well give up already, she thought. Defeatist's talk, and he did hate such talk, but he was gone now.
And she would never, ever hear of him talking about mass over volume equaling density ever again.
A sad, sad fanfic that was based on a true story. The science part, not the death part.
But thank you for reading it, really. I've seen a lot of death fanfics written like this, I think, but I hope mine is at least marginally different and has done it justice.
Thanks :)
-H.H.