Sharing Straws
DISCLAIMER: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance © Square-Enix. I'm just borrowing it.
(IT GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN, LIFE. – we are the reprobates.)
It's a bright blue summer day, the kind of hot that would suffocate if it were just a little more humid. But the wind is blowing hard, so it's bearable.
A boy with shaggy blond hair and a girl with a white ponytail are walking ahead of them down the sidewalk, holding hands. She's got the purse, its straps wrapped so tight around her hand that her fingertips are pink, and he's carrying their drink, some blue punch in one of those giant chalices grown-ups drink fashionable alcohol out of. It has a curly straw and one of those toothpick umbrellas floating in it, buoyed up by ice cubes.
Next to him, Mewt is wearing the new clothes his father bought for his birthday, a green T-shirt and newly fashionable khaki pants called cargoes. He has an ice cream, which he's licking absently, but it's about to drip.
Knowing words won't be enough to reach him, Llednar reaches out and catches the drip with his left ring finger. When Mewt flinches a little in surprise, he just licks the bead of ice cream off and wipes his hand on his shorts.
"Something wrong?"
Mewt makes a helpless smile and shrugs, hair flipping into his eyes and sticking at his skin (it is hot); then he nods his head at the happy couple ahead of them. Ritz is taking a sip from the straw of Marche's drink.
"It's like… they're off in their own world, like they've left us and we… don't exist to us anymore."
"Maybe so…" Llednar considers them—they certainly do seem to be paying attention to nothing but each other lately.
"So it's just—a little lonely, I guess."
Llednar knows that any attempts to alert the boy and girl to their presence won't go well—Mewt probably wouldn't approve of the attempts he'd consider, anyway.
"Well, I'll never leave you, at least," he says assertively.
"Really?"
"I swear I won't." There is no simpler, purer truth, for where Marche and Ritz are two entwined, he and Mewt are more one than two.
To prove it, he puts his hand into Mewt's free one and laces their fingers together in perfect symmetry.