This is an AU, meaning it throws canon to the wind. But I will let you decide what happened in the backstory of this AU.
Enjoy this little oneshot,
H. E. B.
If anyone asked what season they preferred the most, Isabel would readily tell them hers was autumn. She loved the weather being a bit more chilly, the multicolored leaves playing in the wind, even the smell of rain it seemed so common.
What she didn't like was that school started, too, and that meant loads and loads of homework. With both her parents working and Kenny at home with sickness, she was left to her own devices for about two hours, before her mom would go home. Unwilling to be home alone, she found herself in the park every afternoon, completing her homework sitting in one of the benches.
And now, there she was, in the seventh day of that routine, and her eraser had fallen off the bench and somehow rolled far. Isabel left her notebook and went looking for the evasive eraser, finding it among some blades of grass and small stones. The ten-year-old went back to the bench, intending to finish before she had to leave. Her pencil was hovering above the page when she froze. Shivers went through her frame as she stared at words that hadn't been there before.
Aren't you cold?
It was three days before she returned to the park. At first she didn't want to return to it. The situation had been so like the ones in horror movies, an unknown identity communicating with a human, and they went to investigate. Isabel was sure she'd end up dead, if this were a movie.
But she was curious. How could the words gotten onto her notebook, and who had written them. Whoever it was didn't seem unfriendly. After all, they had asked for her wellbeing. She arrived at the bench, hesitated, then raised her voice. "I know you're here, whoever you are! Come out!" she actually didn't know if someone was there. For all she knew, she could be screaming at air.
Minutes passed. "I'm not leaving until you show yourself." she declared, plopping herself on the bench. "Who are you?"
"Why are you here?" and Isabel turned around, her gaze resting on the tree behind her. Or, more specifically, on the individual that was currently sitting under it.
Isabel's first impressions were that he couldn't be more than ten. Shaggy hair that could've been blond but was so dirty she couldn't be sure. Odd, pale orange skin clad in some sort of grey uniform, and she wondered if he was sick. Brown, narrowed eyes completed the picture of the not-unknown-entity.
The only response she gave was a raised eyebrow. "Words suddenly appeared in my notebook. I wanted to know who had done them."
The boy shifted, getting more comfortable against the tree's trunk. "That's dangerous. What if had been an adult? What if I was going to hurt you?"
"Are you going to?"
A pause, and Isabel didn't know if it was hesitation or the boy was just slow. "I don't want to."
"What does it matter, then?" she asked, placing her notebook on the bench to look fully at him.
"Nothing, I suppose. You still haven't answered my question: Aren't you cold?" the boy asked, shivering for emphasis.
Isabel shook her head, and grinned.
Her two hours were almost up. She had to go, she didn't want to worry her mother. "I have to go now. I will be back tomorrow, okay?"
"Okay. Thank you."
That night, as she lay in bed, Isabel realized she hadn't asked the boy's name.
"What's your name?" was the first thing she asked.
The boy never answered. She waited for her two hours, even introducing herself, but as Isabel made her way back, she still had no name.
"I brought this." Isabel said the third day, placing the spare sandwich she had done before coming there on the bench. "Did I offend you?" she asked, focusing on writing. That's why she didn't notice the boy moving until he snatched the sandwich from the bench.
"You didn't offend me. I just didn't feel the need of giving it to you." the boy said between bites, sharp teeth devouring the snack in seconds.
"Why are you here then?" Isabel asked, turning back her attention to her homework companion.
The boy shrugged, going to sit under the tree again. "Just passing through." he said curtly, focusing his wandering eyes on the leaves that were playing carousel with the wind.
But Isabel was nothing if not stubborn. She stared at him, searchingly. "Are you running away?"
A long, long pause. "No."
Another pause, punctuated with Isabel's sighs over the homework.
"You're running away, aren't you?"
The boy made a show of checking her watch. Seventeen minutes. "Yes. I'm running from my captors. They're the scum of the earth. Even mentioning them causes me horrible mental pain. They won't lock me up again. There, satisfied?"
Huffing, the girl pounded on her notebook, not minding if she ruined the papers. "You're a surly one, aren't you? I'm just curious."
"And I just needed to get enough money to keep moving around. I am not interested on you being a minder, gossip, or a substitute sibling," the young boy snapped, his voice low.
"Well you could at least try to be better company!" Discarding all pretense of using her notebook to actually do homework, she slammed it into her lap. "Why are you so... so... mean?"
"Look. I'm just trying to do what I need to. I can't, and have no desire to explain myself. You should be glad I'm just a kid. Would you rather deal with some smarmy perv chatting you up for two hours?"
"No," the girl sighed.
The girl looked away on the next day, after apologies were made and snacks eaten. "I'm just... well I have a friend. More of a brother, really. Given, he's much nicer than you-"
"Good for him."
"-but you remind me of him, for some reason. Probably because I haven't seen him in weeks. he's quite sick," she muttered, fidgeting with her notebook again. "You, this... it just makes me wonder if he'd ever do this kind of thing. Why, would he be alright, what would drive him to do it."
"I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing. I'm just another person you met. You don't know anything about me, don't know who I am, or where I come from. Don't make yourself get involved, when we're just going to go our separate ways." the boy snapped.
"I know, but if you can't tell me, why you're doing something, then..." and the boy could see the worry, displaced, with another face and name, that haunted her. "Lie to me."
A few moments of silence, then the boy finally looked up at her. "Fine. A pretty lie for you today.
I don't know my parents. They died when I was younger, but I can still recall how they felt. That they loved me. I ended up in an orphanage, on the skirts of downtown California..."
The tale continued, and it sounded...odd, to hear. Like listening about a dream half-remembered. "I never did fit in, so other kids left me alone. Still, despite my few friends, how well I was doing in school and the awards I got, something felt missing. So I ran away, decided to look for my family. I mean, they must be somewhere, right? So, I followed the trails, and I ended up looking somewhere far from where I started."
Isabel was absorbing it all, spinning his shadowed tale, part of her wondering if it was the truth told so flippantly, and half wondering what kind of boy would conjure such a tale just to appease her. "Family? That's definitely a good reason. I can see someone going on a long trip for that alone."
"I don't have much choice in this, and I couldn't ask anyone to come with me." the boy replied. "There aren't any records, and all I have are a few hints."
Chuckling a bit, she reached up and shoved him playfully. "I'm almost tempted to follow you and see where you end up."
The boy turned his head to look at her, brown eyes clouded with confusion and curiosity. "Why? None of that-"
"Don't worry about it." Isabel sighed, contented. "I'm just rambling on."
As both of them enjoyed the chill air of autumn, she realized this was the longest he had ever spoken with her.
Soon, their angry routine changed. They started to talk. She was lonely, he was lonely, and they both had time till the boy managed to steal enough money to go far away. They were the same in that, and they understood each other. Isabel's parents' weren't terrible, she told him, they just had a lot of work these days. She made it sound like a mere annoyance, but he knew it hurt her. It would hurt him too, if that was the case.
Of course, he still had the silence. But now, this girl was breaking it.
He was happy, all things considered. Very, very happy.
"Why do you even keep coming here?"
He asked one day.
"I'm bored." She lied.
"What are you, exactly?"
She asked him one day.
"Nothing." He lied.
Their friendship was one based on lies. They gave each other the truth, occasionally, but they mostly lied, and they both knew it.
And they were both searching for the truth.
"You protect the friend you told me because you don't want to be weak anymore, right?" he asked.
"Sure," she answered, and he knew she was lying.
"Are you a human?"she asked.
"Yes," he lied, and she knew how close she was to the answer.
"Are you here day after day because you don't want to be alone?" he asked.
"Of course not!" she lied, and he knew that he was right.
"On TV, there has been reports of an escaped creature. A half-human Kaiju. That's you, isn't it?"
He didn't answer, and she smiled a triumphant smile.
"Where did you get all those scars?"
"MEGTAF is known to experiment."
And she was scared, because they told lies, not truths.
He had just enough for a train trip. To leave.
He didn't know how to tell her.
The boy's visits beside the bench grew shorter and shorter, and one day he stopped coming. Isabel didn't know why she kept coming to the bench. Or, she knew, but didn't want to admit it to herself.
One rainy spring evening, she was once again doing homework when she turned a page. She belatedly realized it was the same notebook the boy had written onto the day they met.
There, written on the page, was a single word:
Duncan.