On more than one occasion he would spot her drawing a some kind of bird suspended in flight on the corners of papers, or on the sides of her textbooks, old newspapers, the backs of flyers no one bothered to look at, the surfaces of tables she was sitting at if there wasn't any paper to be found; any scrap of paper or bare surface she could find would do. Sometimes it was only one bird, sometimes it was just abstract doodles that had nothing to do with anything, except for what was going on in her own head.
It had taken him two months before he thought it polite enough to ask why she did such a thing. "Because I envy them," she would say. "They can come and go as they please. See whatever they want for however long they want; do whatever they like. A life like that sounds great, don't you think?"
No, not particularly. Not to him. What was the point of leisure if it was only a short lived happiness? Besides, he had never been very fond of flying, nor given it any sort of thought other than the planes that were man-made. He didn't even enjoy the flight that had brought him here. Although he did enjoy that in the process it had brought him to her. Over time he did realize, that what he could hope for the most was the freedom, the free will to do, say, be whatever he decided, without the pressure of high expectations looming over his shoulders.
He would always chuckle at the fantasies she'd always tell him with excited enthusiasm. About running off one day, to do all the things she'd dreamed of since she was a child, or just high-tailing it to the nearest state she'd never been to, just because. "Well you can do those things now, can't you? You're still young. No need to rush." To him, it seemed like all she ever did was spend time trying to do things as fast as possible. If it were within his power against her stubbornness, he would try to get her to slow down, and actually enjoy the things she did, instead of breezing through them. And as always, with every conversation they that would end up with him advising her to pace herself, she'd shake her head at him and sigh heavily.
"I'd rather rush."
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A/N: A short introduction, but the first chapter is coming right away!