People Like Us

There was a moment once; I could give you it exactly, but I won't, not now. A moment when I heard you think as though you had said it out loud –

People like us don't say I love you.

Why'd you think that, Erik? Why would that be the way it had to be? I'd wanted to question it there and then – it should have been easy just to say People like us? But of course we do. Of course we can!

But there wouldn't have been an of course for you, and in the moment I realised it, the ability to say it out loud had gone.

Did there need to be a series of moments to highlight our differences? There didn't. But they existed anyway. Remember the day out of many days that we had played chess together, and I had finally broached the question of whether or not it was not cheating on your part to move the pieces without touching them.

"Why not use what you have?" you had replied.

"By that logic, you would never win," I retorted.

"So you've never done it? Can you really tell me you've never done it – even the time I beat you five games down and you suddenly took me out in the last game even though you'd been losing?"

"Damn," I said. "You got me. But that was the only time. Besides technically – your move ends when you take your finger off the piece. Why create the ambiguity?"

"Ambiguity is," you shrugged and would say no more until I re-broached the subject several moves later, when I commented on whether or not your method of playing was not against the rules.

"You and your rules," you said – or something very like it – "We did not make them. Why should we follow them?"

"Because if we did not, we would not be able to play at all."

After that, you told me to shut up and the rest of that day we did not play. At least not at chess.

_x_

There was so much I should have said. So many things I could have told you that would all have boiled down to this one inevitable truth, and so of course, I told you nothing. I would have told these things to people I barely knew before I breathed a word to you.

All my life had been a swirl of voices under which I had so often felt to be drowning. So much strength needed to differentiate, so much control. I was lazy when I was young. I did not want to always try, preferring to wallow in what felt like it could only be madness. Noisy, chattering loudness that kept sleep far away and peace always removed. And then there you were, and it was fitting that you be drowning because there we were together, together in our separate seas. But in those cold waters where I found you, like something out of ancient mythology – I found silence, a stillness in my mind I had never imagined. Because your thoughts did not swirl, as the rest of the world did, but were something intent and firm and woven with mine as though they had always been there and that this was what I had been searching for the whole time, in all that confusion and noise – the mind to which mine could attune.

Of course I underplay how terrifying it was, for nostalgia gives everything a twist of untruth. But I know that for a while I was sure, certain that I had found my path. That the future had become more mapped for me than I had thought I could ever be. It was wonderful, thrilling, frightening and curiously close to perfect.

And not to last.

For then you were gone, and I could not help but wonder if three judiciously timed words could not have held you back. I had been on the verge, right there on the beach. Why did it have to be then that I finally and for once agreed with you on something –anything – and why did it have to be that? And was it not ironic that in agreeing I was conceding to a point you had been making all along, that there was a state of them and us and that it had to be this way. Why did I have to be ruined by your words just as I was breaking away from you out of a disagreement I could see your side of?

Would it even have held you back? You seemed to be doing well at doing all you could to keep me out of your head. There were more barriers there than just the damned helmet. It did not matter, in the end that was no end to anything at all. It did not matter to wonder what the result of any such utterance on my part would have been. You were right –

People like us don't say I Love You.

_x_

So this is the first time I've written for this fandom, I'm just sort of testing the waters! If it's any good it may grow into something – if not I may try something else. Feedback would be very much appreciated as I'm always nervous about writing with new characters! :-)