Whenever he's here, it's dark outside.
He doesn't go in the beautiful dark, the kind that's like the sputtering out of the final embers of sunset; that's not what suits him. It's the prowler-dark. The shiver-dark. When people lock their doors and kiss their children, and the moon is fuller than it should be and the air feels colder than it should feel. Every honk of a horn sounds like the baying of wolves and every footfall creeps up your spine like the snick of teeth just too long and too sharp to be entirely human. Even practical people, sane people, bundle up a little tighter and wonder if this is a night where strange things come out and play.
And then the practical people, sane people, pause. And they wonder what came over them in that instant, walking in a town so safe on a street so dark—dark, they rationalize, simply because a certain town mayor is too lazy to erect a few lousy street lamps—and they go home and microwave InstaNoodles and totally forget any fleeting feeling of anxiety they might have had.
Since, like, duh. Stories are for kids.
For kids and for me—until the kids outgrow them, because I never will.
Not because I didn't try, but because they won't let me... And if I told you right now that you could never, never see the color blue, or else you would die, and I locked you in a cell with Jellal and Levy and a TV that only played old episodes of Blue's Clues, would you be able to retrain your brain to see black-and-white? Maybe. If you spent decades of intense meditation or hypnotized yourself or something like that.
It sounds like so much work, though. So I'll pass. I'm not the weirdest person on the block, not by a long shot. Or maybe I am, and everyone's quirks are just funny little fabrications spun in my mind; it's so hard to tell. Sometimes they seem sickeningly mundane, and other times I wonder why my neighbors are allowed to walk the streets without armed escorts.
Deny, deny, deny—that's all they do, so for a while, at least, I'll play their game.
Boring front and center; and God, lock your imagination in a strongbox and feed it to the talking piranhas you're so convinced live in your neighbor's toilet bowl, Lucy. Walk past Natsu's blue—blue and winged—werecat and totally ignore Jellal's freaky tattoo...which does not mean he's part of an underground criminal cult bent on resurrecting the god of darkness, okay?
By the way, Jellal's girlfriend? So not a warrior fairy. So not. And sweet Mira down the hall, who likes to bake cherry-flavored cupcakes, yeah: guess what? She can't turn into a demon.
If that's how they want to play it, fine by me; but I know.
But you'd think, you'd think that in a building where everyone is so weird, that my surreal little fantasies and kind of mild, barely there violence — come on, does beating up one pervy ginger in sunglasses count?—would fit neatly into its slot and enjoy a nice, quiet life in the background.
There's a key difference, though, between me and them.
Someone taught them at some point to cover it up, and either I missed the memo or my head was too detached from my body to bother with the details of it. Maybe I'm just a shitty actor. I don't know. But for whatever reason, I can't pretend that every falling leaf doesn't foreshadow an invasion of microscopic aliens on tiny little ships; or that a power outage doesn't mean that the US government has kept under wraps the really scary knowledge that the world has barely enough energy to light up a Barbie castle, and we're all gonna have to go back to living in caves and wearing the pelts of saber-toothed freaking tigers. I can't. It's instinctive.
Natsu says it's demented. Natsu also eats raw fish and likes lighting my underpants on fire.
Don't listen to Natsu.
Okay, so everyone is—you know—really weird; and that's fine, because who am I to judge? All I'm saying is that we could be weird together, like a support group or a sanctuary or something. We could give sympathetic hugs and have meetings over coffee and donuts where we talk about our weird problems, and it would be all lovely and cuddly and safe.
But no. That's not how it works here in Magnolia, where we keep restraining orders against things like safety and cuddles. Here, we fix our masks on before stepping out our front doors. We drown out the screams next door with our TVs, pretend that all the terrified-looking garden statues on Evergreen's porch really came from Home Depot.
In short, we put the complex in apartment complex.
So I drink my tea alone, with a lonely sprinkled donut. Only Plue sympathetically coos at my weird problems.
But no matter how accustomed I am to my fellow Magnolia maniacs, my ears prick up when a newbie arrives. The dark man. Shiver guy. Blame my paranoia, or the fact that I read too many books, but he irks me in ways even Jellal doesn't.
(Don't get me wrong, I love Jellal. We're friends, we go to book clubs and play Wii, but the guy is angstier than Edward Cullen and about as pasty.)
And sure, the man is attractive the way an emo version of Natsu would be. All charcoal eyes, spiky hair, cutting jawline. Yes, he happens to wear his shirts half-unbuttoned, showing a glimmer of black tattoo. Yes, I happen to be eighteen, crazy and a little bored.
I know weirdness though, all casts and colors. I collect it in stories that line my bookshelves. Weirdness needs a home to thrive in, fellow weirdos to inspire it, and someone to coax it out of our shy, boring selves. I've always been lucky, because I had that helping hand. (Actually, I had two helping hands, a head of pink hair, and four blue paws — all of which came with a fish platter.)
When I watch the guy walk past our building at night, he never seems ominous to me. He seems lost.
Tonight, as I settle in with a cup of tea near my window, I watch him make the rounds. The street is deserted, as always. He pauses in front of my apartment for a second, glancing at my obnoxiously pink door. Pushes his bangs back, flicks his eyes up to my window. I know better than to feel singled out; my curtains are pink and luminous, too. Anyone would stare.
He keeps walking. Like a Mako shark, I think. He acts like if he stops too long, he'll just fall down dead.
Three rounds later, a wind kicks up that rustles my curtains and startles me out of my doze. I look out the window to find him still wandering, hands stuffed in his pockets. His breath fogs. It's December, and his shirt looks paper-thin.
God—I should stop this, because it's private, whatever he's doing, and I'm not meant to see. But he's just so...sad. So battered. He looks like all the things I ran from: boarded-up windows, funeral homes, broken china figurines. He looks a little like my mom did when she thought she was alone.
The man stops in front of my mailbox again, sending my paranoid little brain into a tailspin. He can see me, he must know… But whatever captures his attention, it isn't me. He gaze stops short of my window, surprisingly intense, fixed on—
(Oh, I think. So he really was lost.)
—on the "APARTMENTS AVAILABLE" sign hanging from Gildarts' windowsill.
Shiver Guy looks, really looks. For the first time, he's still enough for me to study his face—which is thin and winter-pale—and the longing on it is so visible it hurts.
So I turn off the lights. It's late, I'm tired, and I have too many of my own painful memories to wonder about his right now. Besides, I know the end to this story already; it's nothing new. He'll look at the sign for over five minutes, pace, and look at it again. Eventually, he'll study it so hard that he'll memorize the number without meaning to. Before he falls asleep, he'll tell himself he'll never call anyway.
But he'll call. In two weeks, or two months, or two years. His type always does. They bring only two or three moving boxes, a sad past and sometimes a leather jacket. They mean well, despite their cliches.
Magnolia's not perfect, but it's a start. We all start here. At the very least, it gives us somewhere to go that's not the street in the middle of the night—it's warm, and the coffee's good.
At least here we can close our curtains against the dark, and pretend for a moment that we're a little less lost.
notes: ok if u read chains of the aviary u know that i clearly have a thing for stories where gray just wanders around in skimpy clothes at night, sue me
anywho...this was a writing exercise, but i kinda dig the whole "psycho apartment complex" thing. might be a fun multichap. lemme know what you think. love y'all :)