1
Why is an orange smart?
Because it concentrates.
An endless sky like a seamless, flowing garment—if he swallowed it, could he absorb those infinite possibilities? If the sky was in his soul, then that made the clouds, the stars, the sun. . . what? Cloudgazing and starwatching, eclipses and meteor showers; implant them in the soul and you get. . . what? Slaine smiled. Something beautiful. A human with the sky in them, a human with wings. Not an angel, not a dove. A human with wings would be a creature that hides away from the light because it's not perfect. It would confuse good with perfect and use its flaws to hide its beauty because if you're not perfect, you must be bad, right? Because it would be so simple to believe that millions of bad things outweigh a few good things. So yes, this human with wings, it would be something like. . . a bat.
But if you never weighed the good against the bad, if you never looked at the numbers, never quantified, how could you know for sure?
Slaine spread his arms and legs in the grass, like a snow angel. But there was no snow, and he was no angel. The wind blew his hair over his eyes, and he closed them. The grass undulated all around him, but beneath him, all still. An Earth that rotated and revolved, lives that rose and fell to the steady rhythm of a breathing chest, all that went on while Slaine, well, he lay in the grass. His mind whirred, it pirouetted, it soared. It did everything but move him, and that was just how it was.
But it wasn't his mind that was doing these things. If it were, he would be going somewhere. No, it was his soul, and all he could do was feel. Dream, think, and feel.
What would happen if he dared to move?
He reached an arm into the air, clenching and unclenching his fingers. Something impeded his source of light, but he knew the clouds hadn't shifted because the heat and light exposure over the rest of his body was the same.
"Who's leaning over me?" Slaine said, lowering his arm.
"See for yourself."
He didn't recognize the voice. Male, about his age, monotone. Quiet, but not in the sense that he seemed shy. No, he had spoken at a precise volume, like he had calculated the minimum volume requisite to be heard at his distance from Slaine. Yeah, people didn't really do that, but that was the impression Slaine got, and for the boy who thought with his soul, intuition was everything.
Slaine rolled onto his side and covered his ears. "Say that again." Say anything. He just needed to hear him speak again.
"You heard me the first time."
The impression he got from the boy's voice was the same as the first time. Calculated. Quantified. Measured. The very things Slaine thought he wanted in his life. Opposites to his estimation, qualification, intuition.
Slaine pulled his hood over his head. He wanted to keep pushing this. A part of him wanted this beautiful concept—logic—to breakdown because if it didn't, he would lose something when he opened his eyes. The logic would be dissolved and diluted when it was put into a body, put with a face. Humanity corrupts pure logic and converts it into a usable form, like the nitrogen cycle.
"How"—Slaine pulled the strings on his hood taut—"how do you know I heard you? Why are you so certain?"
And why do I want to know so badly? Because maybe, just maybe, if he knew the reason that reason itself was certain of itself, perhaps that would be enough for him. Perhaps he would be able to be certain enough to have faith in something, too.
Slaine yelped when hands, not his own, jerked his hood off and pried his hands away from his ears. Steady, confident breath hovered above his ear. It was tantalizingly close, the secret knowledge. If pure logic was air, he was close enough to breathe it in, to take it into his body and let his blood carry it everywhere.
"The volume of air intake during respiration controls voice volume." As if to prove a point, he had dropped his voice to a whisper, and Slaine felt that the force of the breathing against his ear was softer. "If you know the range of average human hearing, you can judge how loudly you need to speak." He smirked into a laugh, and the airy sound tickled the hair around Slaine's ear. "The brain estimates this process for you subconsciously, to a certain degree of accuracy."
"I know that." He really did. Slaine rolled onto his back, and his shoulder hit a pair of shoes. "I asked why you sounded so sure of yourself when you said I heard you."
"Because I calculated."
And then Slaine's eyes opened, not of their own, and somehow he knew, all of him knew, that there was pure, elemental logic in the boy kneeling next to him. It was logic in its unaltered form, and he could use it. The wind tussled his brown hair, sweeping his bangs away from his face as if nature invited him to peer into the face of reason. The sun struck his eyes just right so that they toed the infinitesimally thin line between red and brown. They were warm, and they were cold, those eyes. The oxymoronic balance between all that could and could not be, it was. . .
"Brilliant," Slaine breathed.
The boy raised an eyebrow. "Honestly, what goes through your head?"
A pink the color of blooming cherry blossom petals dusted Slaine's cheeks. It wouldn't make sense even if I told you. But he wanted it to make sense; he wanted logic to find meaning in the things that held none for him.
"The sky," Slaine said. "The sky goes through my head." And deep down into my soul.
The other boy leaned back on his palms, as if he sensed—calculated—that this would be a long conversation. "It would have been clearer and more precise to say, 'I'm thinking about the sky.'"
Slaine lay on his side, facing toward the boy. If he was going to make himself comfortable, then there was no reason Slaine shouldn't, too.
"But I'm not," Slaine said, "thinking about the sky."
"Then, what—"
"You. Brilliant was the adjective I used to modify you."
"I'm flattered."
Slaine snorted. So, logic had a sense of humor, huh?
"When a stranger approaches you while your eyes are closed and you're prone and vulnerable, the natural reaction is to open your eyes. To examine the intruder as a potential threat."
Hiding a smile, Slaine marveled. From A to B to—
"Why did you disregard that reaction? Are you that trusting?"
To C. Brilliant.
"Because there was something beautifully impossible and impossibly beautiful that I didn't want to break," Slaine answered. "And no, it hasn't broken yet. It's still here."
The boy merely nodded slowly, as if he were thinking. As if he were wondering what that thing could be. Slaine supposed he couldn't figure it out, because a moment later, he asked, "What is it?"
"If I told you, you'd just laugh."
"Probably."
Slaine, after several minutes of silence between them—silence he imagined the other boy spent thinking about that beautiful thing—sat up. He said, "Ever heard of synesthesia?"
A curt nod.
"Orange," Slaine said, standing. "You're orange to me. And not just the color."
He held out a hand to help the other boy up. Slender, analytical fingers grasped his hand, palpating him, collecting information. It wasn't just his intuition this time. He knew, he was certain, because he felt Orange's fingertips brush a scar on the belly of his wrist, inside his cardigan sleeve. Slaine jerked his hand away, but he seemed to be expecting that because he adjusted to the loss of support quickly, without falling.
"Fly away, Bat."
Slaine laughed into the sky. Another impression. He was thinking about me, too. And how perfect it was, that the boy who thought with his soul had met the boy who thought with his mind.
For Michael. Merry Christmas.