It took losing him once to realize she had feelings for him. Funny how you can hold something so profound about yourself buried so completely beneath the layers of your own identity, hidden away from view, waiting for some unlikely event bring it surging to the surface, unbidden, to change the very fabric of who you are. Funny, too, how these revelations always seem to come bound to a difficult, life altering set of choices. Do you stay the course, safe and secure in the familiar patterns of your current life, or surrender yourself to something completely new and unexpected? She can admit to herself, at least, that fear and doubt got the better of her when her time came. And so she had kept her newfound feelings hidden. It was easy, after all. There had been plenty of other distractions to keep her occupied.
But now she was losing him again.
The wardrobe had been emptied of its contents, the desk stripped bare. The iconic poster of Albert Einstein no longer graced its usual place on the wall, having long ago been packed away with all of the other missing belongings. Two luggage cases sat in the middle of the room, one of them already packed. One still remained open, and it was into this that he was gently arranging the components of his desktop computer, the very last of his belongings to be packed.
She stood in the doorway, silently watching as stripped last the pieces of himself from the room he had called his own for the past four years, struggling with a torrent of emotions whirling around inside her that even now she found herself incapable of finding words to describe. They had all tried to talk him out of it, individually as well as collectively. They had assaulted him with their desperate pleas, tearful outbursts, angry lectures. They had given it everything they had. None of it had changed his mind. They had all long since given up on him by now. Why she still bothered, they never understood.
The last suitcase was closed with a gesture of finality. The boy stood, grabbed the handles of the two cases, strode purposefully towards the door, towards her, wheeling the luggage behind him. The look in his eyes was simply empty, the eyes of someone void of passion, driven only by the mechanics of the task at hand. Even though he was looking at her she knew his gaze went right through her, his focus solely on the path to his final destination. Watching his approach, a shock of terror coursed through her then as she realized she was witnessing the final moments of his time at Kadic Academy, that she really would never see him again when he rode beyond those gates. With a desperate resolve she rooted herself in place before the door frame. She couldn't allow him to simply walk away, not without trying one last time.
"Please move."
It hurt, the way he spoke with such coldness, like there had never been a friendship between them, like she was just some stranger blocking his was and he had no time to be bothered with her. How could he just let go of what they had so easily? Why didn't this seem to hurt him the way it hurt her? She stayed firmly in place, desperately searching his eyes for some hint of the boy she once knew, struggling to find words that wouldn't just fall on deaf ears.
"Don't go."
Really? With everything at stake, that was all she could think to say?
"Don't. Just don't." He shook his head dismissively, still staring right through her. "I'm leaving. That's final. Please get out of my way."
"Why are you doing this? What reason could you possibly have for abandoning all your friends like they never meant anything to you. How can you just walk out on us after all we've been through together?"
He sighed in open aggravation, releasing the handholds of his luggage to prop one hand on his hip while the other clutched at his temple, his eyes closing briefly before focusing on her own, fixing her with an intense glare. "I've been through this a million times with all of you. What part of 'I just don't want to be here' is so hard for you to understand?"
"All of it." She was raising her voice now. She couldn't help it. "None of this makes any sense. You're treating all of us like strangers. First you up and dump Aelita without any explanation, then you go and just ditch the rest of us like we were never your friends to begin with. Tell me. What exactly did we do to you to push you away like this?"
For a moment his eyes were looking through her again, every muscle tensed like he was prepared to simple shove past her to get his way. Then, all at once, he slumped forward in a gesture of some internal submission, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, and vented a long sigh.
"Just let me go, please."
"I can't. Not until I understand why you think you need to erase your life here before you can be happy."
He straightened then, apprising her intently for a long moment, his blue eyes boring into her in a way that made her insides knot. There was a weariness in his face, the look of someone carrying a heavy burden for far too long. Finally his expression softened and she saw for the first time in days a hint of real emotion, an aura of deep sorrow seeping through the cracks of his armor. "I don't expect you to understand what I'm going through. It hurts... being around you, being around them. I can't take being here in this school anymore. All of it just reminds me that I don't belong here."
She was genuinely baffled. Apart from their new found freedom from having to save the world day after day from a genocidal AI living in a supercomputer, nothing else had changed among their group of friends. If anything, their hard won victory should have brought them all closer together. "Of course you belong here. How could you possibly think you don't."
"I just don't." His was shouting now, hands balling into tight fists, his cold mask finally cracking to reveal genuine anger. He spun away from her as if he could no longer stand to look at her, his hands grabbing at his temples as he paced steadily across the empty room. When his breathing calmed he turned back around to face her again.
"Don't you get it? Before now fighting Xana was my whole life. I was a nobody when I first came here, just a nerd playing alone with his stupid robots. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, I'm the only one who can stop and evil computer program from destroying the world. Do you know how many countless hours I spent pouring over computer code, trying to best an AI hundreds of times more intelligent than the average human in its own domain? Do you have any idea what it took just to keep up with the endless attacks Xana flung at us, and I'm not just talking about the ones that came into our world, no. There were the literally thousands of cyber attacks he made every single day to try and damage the supercomputer from within that I had to deal with myself. It took everything I had, every bit of skill, every bit of knowledge. And you know what? A part of me actually enjoyed it. Even with the countless hours of lost sleep, the endless stressing over when the next attack was coming, the countless close calls and enough near death experiences to last a lifetime, I loved the challenge. For the first time in my life I felt important, like what I was doing actually mattered. Now that it's over my old, boring life just doesn't even come close. No matter what I do I don't feel anything anymore. No excitement. No joy. Just nothing. Just try to imagine that, feeling nothing at all, empty, barren, nothing inside you but endless misery as you watch your life pass you by, watch your best friends move on and enjoy their own lives while all you can do is pretend. That's why I pushed you all out of my life. So do you get it now? That's why I have to leave Kadic. To get away from it all before I completely lose my mind."
The silence that filled the room was heavy with meaning as he recovered the breath he had spent in his tirade, his eyes locked on hers, intense with the expectation of her reply. She was gaping at him, to shocked to speak. All the weeks they had spent interrogating him only to be given vague excuses and elusive answers. All their wasted efforts to try and reach him when he wouldn't even tell them what was even wrong. Now that she understood she was filled with an overwhelming regret. If he had just said this outright, surely his friends could have helped him before it came to this. When she finally found her voice, it came out a near whisper. "You could have come to us. We could have helped you."
"I didn't ask for your help. I didn't want your help, and I don't want your help now. I just want to leave. Is that too much to ask?"
The words stung like a slap in the face. Her vision blurred beneath a fresh curtain of wetness as she fought back the anguish searing in her chest. "but we all care about you. We always have. We want to help you. Can't you just let us do that? Can't we at least try?"
He seemed to deflate then, all the emotion that had built up before draining from him all at once, leaving him empty once more. He moved slowly but purposefully towards the two suitcases he had abandoned near the doorway, took up the handles once more, looked meaningfully into her eyes.
"Goodbye Yumi."
With that he pressed forward, and this time she didn't stop him, stepping aside to let him pass unobstructed through the doorway of the dormitory that she could no longer call his own. She watched as the distance between them grew steadily larger. With every step he took she could feel a growing emptiness hollowing out a space inside of herself, a feeling of something precious being ripped from her ever so slowly. A thought hit her then, born of hope or desperation she didn't know, but she had to try it.
"Jeremie!"
She sprinted after him, overtaking him in the corridor and stopped in front of him to block his way once again. He stopped short, regarding her with something akin to a long-suffering resolve.
"Let me give you just one more reason for you to stay. And I swear, if it's not enough to change your mind I won't stop you anymore, just hear me out."
He sighed wearily, making no effort to hide his skepticism.
"I promise," she insisted, her eyes pleading.
He released his luggage, let his arms fall back at his sides, that familiar gesture of submission. "Fine. I'm listening."
She closed the space between them in two steps. Before he could react he was swept into her tight embrace, her lips pressed firmly against his own. A jolt of electricity seemed to pass between them, an unexpected rush of pleasure mixed in along with the shock and confusion that left him momentarily paralyzed. Next thing he knew his world was a spiraling rush of emotions, intense and heady, drawing out something within himself he didn't know existed, or, perhaps, he had long forgotten he had ever had. As she lingered in the kiss his arms found her waist of their own accord, pulled her closer to him. She leaned into him, pouring out every bit of passion she felt into the kiss, surrendering fully to the feelings she had kept locked away for so long. He could feel her need of him, all the unspoken feelings that had brought her to him in these final moments, tearing at the numbness within him, desperate to find some feeling there.
When they finally parted, breathless and flushed, she looked into his eyes expectantly, anxiously, looking now incredibly vulnerable. "So, tell me. Was that enough?"
There was no way the whirling storm of confusing thoughts and emotions still wreaking havoc through his brain were going to allow him to answer her properly, so he just kissed her again.