Frustration let out in a sweet tragedy. If you can guess how many references I've made to 'The Smiths', you'll get a free story.
B/A, or simply friendship- whichever. LABB never happened. B is physically adult.

(One particular sentence fixed.)

Half-width, enjoy.


He remembers, and it makes him nauseous. Alternate is the most beautiful thing he'll ever be graced with.

Birthday may be considered an adult, but as a cracked pad thumbs his cracked mouth, he realises that Alternate took his sense of maturity, his sense of adulthood. The dried grass, the palest yellow, mirrors the hair he was forbidden to touch at night- but the forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest, and he touched them each and every evening, when his head lay amongst words of useless knowledge.

Now, he touches, touches, touches the grass and it crumbles in his careless palm.

(Birthday likes to believe some unspoken, illogical monster has dragged him to the sanctity of the old House.)

"B believes his best buddy has vamoosed."

And he wonders what gave him this idea, even as his nose smells a familiar scent of cotton, and his free hand is busy with the tender petting of a young boy's tee-shirt. Surely his Alternate has grown since then, into a robust young man with straw-coloured hair and the widest atmospheric eyes and pale, sweeping eyelashes that ensnared Birthday as a child.

Alas, when the man is finished seeping his sorrow into the shirt, it's stained and empty.

"B is bemused to see what he's been bound for."

To this day Birthday knows of Alternate's murderer. Of the demon who washed the colour from precious lips.

"L doesn't know the damage he has caused B. He doesn't know the damage he has caused A, and B, and us."

(Note, the alliteration was ignored. Also note, there was never an 'us' to speak of. Alternate was never his.)

"One day, A. One day, we'll dance." Clairvoyant eyes, they close with incredible deliberation. "Oh, your untouched, unsoiled, wondrous eyes! I miss them so. A has always been what most matters, even as his acuity became his downfall. Even as he placed that disgusting noose about his neck."

A smile here, albeit sad and inanimate. "Even as you hanged. I loved you then,"

("You never knew how much I liked you, because I never told you." and "Are you still here?")

Beyond Birthday, years from the tragedy, presses his lips to the ground of the gardens, the setting where his best friend, his hero was hung most precariously, trophy-like and glorious. "Just fifteen minutes with you… I would never say no to such a thing. No one saw your worth as I did."

The Wammy House was an impalement. Alas, sleeping amongst the flowers and misery, Birthday felt complete.

"You are my first and only friend, Alternate."

(Alternate frowns at the sight of his eccentric roommate tittering madly. "B Backup is beyond repair.")