A/N: You know those kids who like, define themselves by their grades in school? Like, the more people you beat, the better you are or the more you're worth? I dunno. I've been running into some of those people lately. I'm starting to see them as a sort of unavoidable natural disaster.

Anyways. I wrote at least sixty percent of this like, in public, and disjointedly, which is probably really bad?

WAIT WAIT WAIT

BEFORE YOU LEAVE

...

okay so you know those moments when you raise your hand and the teacher calls on you and you're like "uhhh I forgot can you come back to me" and you remember like THREE SECONDS LATER? I...I will get back to you.


The Snake is Sitting on the Throne, the King is Hissing in the Tree.


"I have no more clear packaging tape left. Oh my dear and undying love of adhesive. What would my locker look like without you? It would be a tragedy. I'm starving, but I don't want food."
- Zoe Trope, Please Don't Kill the Freshman


The strangest hunger had settled itself in his stomach. Hollow. He imagined it was the void where his energy had been. Because he didn't want food, exactly, or water, but if he was full enough it was a hollow sort of full. Like he wanted something, physically. A hunger without hunger. He had no name for it. It coiled in his sternum like a snake eating its own tail.

Zexion stopped running and stared straight ahead, at the house he saw through the trees, and at the house next to that one, and the empty asphalt road next to that one. And he tripped over a rotting train track and righted himself.

There was a suburb an hour's run from there this whole time?

Maybe it was – one of those places where half the stuff had been left behind.

Stuff like metal and matches and kindling, and fans and wires and salvageable parts from cars - ! Stuff he could use.

Just so long as they couldn't find him. And who would, all the way out here?


Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
- Edgar Allen Poe


As soon as the door slammed shut Seifer brought his defensive hands down again, panting just slightly from the excitement. And he met Hayner's eyes with wild ones and whooped, pumping his fist in the air triumphantly. "You crazy bastard!" he shouted, punching Hayner's shoulder. "Oh, you crazy ass! Ha! I could fuckin' kiss you!"

"It's just a key," Hayner muttered sheepishly.

"One more key than we had before," Seifer said, laying his hand on Hayner's back. "Sure as hell can't hurt, can it? Lemme see."

Cupping his fingers around it, Hayner let the key slide into Seifer's palm. Protectively, like it was breakable, or like someone would steal it.

He immediately missed memorizing that shape with his fingers, and watched hungrily as Seifer held it up to the light, ran his thumb over the indented plastic H on the top, the logo of the company, down the chinked metal of the side. It really was just a car key. It didn't even have any of those buttons that locked the car from far away.

"I broke one of these once," Seifer said lowly. "It was from a rental car company, too, so my mom was really pissed. I didn't even break the important part. Just the – plastic…"

"What's inside?"

"Huh? Well, nothing weird, but the metal was shaped funny. But I bet we could – hang on, can we switch shoes for a sec?"

"Why?"

"Never mind, I can probably do it with these." Seifer squeezed the key tight in his own hand and dropped it on the ground while Hayner, instinctively, looked around to see if anyone was watching. They weren't. Perhaps key stealing was a commonplace thing with these people.

CRACK! which did get their attention.

"What the fuck are you doing, Seifer!"

"Calm down, will ya? I just broke the plastic like I said I would!" He hadn't said anything about doing it now, but fine. Fine, Seifer, step on Hayner's new stolen key and break it to see what's inside, sure. Seifer lifted up his boot, shaking it to get out the shards of textured grey plastic, and witnessed the fruits of his labor.

"Checkitout, lamer." He grinned and stooped down to pick it up. "'S our own little multi-tool in here."

"It's a lump of metal," Hayner scoffed. "It's not even sharp!"

"Sure is sharp one way." And that was when Seifer held up the key to freedom, the key side being truly and completely useless. Inside was a flat pancake of metal, connected to the blade of the key; and it was thin and shining with a dull luster. And, yes, when you looked at it from the side it was really very thin, and really very sharp, he imagined, if you tried to cut something with it. "Looks like you got me a new knife. Tiny-ass one, of course, won't cut paper or nothing, but hey. We got us a knife, Hayner."

Hayner tried to hide how much he liked that he said 'we' the second time.

He sat down on his butt, wondering how, though, a two-centimeter-long hardly-sharp blade was going to help them in any way, fingering a chunk of plastic. Looking to the side yielded the unfortunate sight of three girls, all against the wall the same way, their knees bent and touching. One leaned her head against another's shoulder, and she reciprocated by putting her head against that head. They all three looked quite sleepy.

The more awake one, whose head did not lean on anything, noticed Hayner staring and offered him a dubious smile. Hayner dubious smiled back. "Hey," he said, though he didn't know if she could hear. If she could, she didn't respond; her eyes slid shut and she leaned her head against the wall.

Seifer, across from him, pinched that key and looked at it, one side then the other, then the first again. Car keys, unlike house keys, it seemed, did not have sharp enough teeth to do much. Like a thick piece of metal had been engraved on either side but not in the middle; any sharpness was blocked.

"Quit botherin' the girls," he muttered. "I told you, interacting with them might be dangerous."

There had been this one summer. The summer, as Hayner referred to it, when You Learned You Could Die. He figured out that going outside could get you run over or beat up or lost and alone, that it could get you bitten by mosquitoes with West Nile Virus and ticks with Rocky Mountain Fever, that you could be stalked or murdered or die of hunger and thirst, that a tree could fall over and crush you or a giant octopus might eat you if you went to the beach. He'd hardly left the town. Barely left his house he was so scared. And though by the end of the summer he had been okay, Hayner was now starting to think that he hadn't so much gotten over it as learned to ignore it. And he was starting to wonder, more and more, if that was how all big problems went.

"So how's a knife help us now? Not much to cut besides carpet and hair as far as I can tell."

"Dunno. Hey Ginger!"

The redhead, Sora's friend, jumped a little in the corner and met his eyes. "What." They must've been talking about something, her and her little boyfriend, because she seemed angrier than usual.

"You got any ventilation shafts here? You know, the little square things that open up into tubes. In the walls."

"Yeah, but they're covered up," Sora said helpfully, pointing to something in the far corner. "Been like that since before I got here. You can't get out that way; I tried. Only ventilation left in here is the cracks in the walls."


If Sora had tried, Hayner wondered how he had tried. But the two of them took naps that day, and come nightfall the mortal enemies of Twilight Town were crouched around what was left of the shaft opening, whispering so as not to wake anyone else up.

It had been more than covered. It had been locked down, bolted shut, frozen. A half-inch thick metal plate had been planted over the vent, and screws dotted the entire perimeter, painted over a neutral mint green to match the walls. It smelled like old paint, cracked like old paint with bubbles.

How do you even try to get past that?

Reaching up a chipped, worn fingernail, Hayner scratched at the coating around one of the screws, picking off drying flecks of paint.

"Any ideas?"

"Not really." He continued to clean the paint off the screw until shiny metal shone through; he'd been half hoping that it would turn out to be foam or wood or something else breakable underneath that. Trying to think like an adventure show, his mind drifted to crow bars and hard kicks armed with heavy black boots. Not useful, since they didn't have either of those things.

"Well…how do you usually get rid of some big hunk of metal?"

"Usually? They probably melt it off or weld it or something," Seifer said dismissively, rolling back on the balls of his feet until his butt plopped onto the ground. This was not as exciting as adventure shows. There wasn't a countdown or a bomb or a mutant dinosaur or anything, and they weren't even sure if escaping would work. Or if it was actually better out there.

"Can I see the knife?" Hayner asked, holding his hand out expectantly.

Handing it over nonchalantly, Seifer replied. "Sure. Why?"

"Uh. Dunno yet. I've got like, the beginnings of an idea, I guess."

"Okay." Unexpectedly laid back, he seemed.

Hayner ran his thumb around the edge of the silver thing, and really, it wasn't a knife. It was, if anything, comparable to the strip of metal that went down the middle of quality knifes. The kind sandwiched by the two pieces of wood that made up the handle. It was missing the blade on the other end.

I could…scrape the rest of the paint off with the metal. Useful. I could…in his mind the blade played over the plate, dream-like, doing whatever he could think of. Slashing little claw marks into the side. Engraving things. Running along the seam to separate the paint on the plate from the paint on the wall. Using it like a tiny crow bar to lift out some of the screws. It was too small to dent, really; it didn't have any weak points.

He tried the crow bar thing, leveling the metal under. He couldn't even get it far enough. It kept slipping out.

"Worth a try," Seifer commended him.

Oh, gee, thanks. What I really need now, Seif, is your fuckingcondescension. God, I miss having friends.

"Hn." The thing was that if they could have been friends, if there was any way they could have gotten along and realized they were just being petty, they would've done it already. However many years it'd been – they could've gotten over their little discrepancies in that time, in years spent around each other. But they were simply – incompatible. They had to be. You couldn't go years being that close with someone and only then find out you could be fast friends. They had tried and failed to get along, and had come to terms with it.

Some people are like that.

Hayner looked at Seifer and distanced himself as well he could from what he thought about the guy. Looked at him as just…guy. Helpful guy who looked out for the both of them. Blond guy. Guy with the hat. Who liked to run his fingers across things to get a feel for them, like he did with buildings, and food, and places to sleep. He could imagine being friends with that guy, but Seifer just didn't seem interested. Maybe if Hayner acted like his old lackeys, but…he couldn't do that, either. He was too stubborn and Seifer didn't like him enough to interact with him beyond what was totally necessary.

Some people are like that.

"Wait," Hayner said, though Seifer hadn't made a move to do anything. "I might have a better idea." He slipped the thinness of the blade into the crack of the screw and twisted, as far as he could manage, until his fingers turned white with the effort. "Shit," he hissed, dropping it.

"Were you turning to the right? I'm pretty sure that to unscrew it you have to turn it to the left – "

"Yeah, I know." Taking a moment to remember his right from his left, Hayner flushed with the realization he'd been going to the right. "It's just stuck." He used the blade as a screw driver again, this time turning to the left. There was just the smallest amount of give, but…

"Here, you try," he handed the thing to Seifer. "My fingers hurt."

Seifer kept his eyes on Hayner for a second, wordless and indecipherable, before he snatched the key. "Whatever."

Things like that.

Years and years and they hardly knew each other at all.

Seifer went for the same screw as Hayner'd been working on, a tendon in his wrist straining as he twisted it. Triumph floated in the air around the crack of paint which arose around the screw, freeing it. The eventual turning looked slow and painful. "Damn, you're right," came the mutter. "This thing's really rusted in here."

"I know," Hayner grumbled, sitting back and taking it as an insult that Seifer had ever doubted him. Always Are you sure, Hayner? Do you know what you're doing, Hayner? Are you certain you aren't just a total, complete fuck-up and that I don't need you? Yes? No? Let me check.

"Oof," Seifer grunted, suddenly jerking back and landing on his ass. There was a dull, muffled clunk. "One down."

Hayner picked up the loosened screw and ran his thumb over the threading; it was rough with rust and left a long red stain on his hand. "Gross."

"My hand's killing me. Switch off."

"Yeah. Gimme."

He was right about the pain; you had to twist so hard the edges of the metal dug into the palm of your hand. But God, it was so satisfying when it started to turn, the flesh of his hand white his bones sore and finally enough pressure that the paint cracked, outlining the edge of the screw, and it was so satisfying when it started to turn!

That was how they went, all night. Pain when the key dug into their hands, the muscles of their arms sore. And when it was Seifer's turn, Hayner just watched him secure in the knowledge his watching went unnoticed. He studied the way his accomplice's muscled bunched and how the fine tendons in his wrists grew taught; how, about halfway through, he couldn't do it without shaking a little bit. After a few breaks, during which they had nothing to talk about besides the different parts of their arms which hurt, it was Seifer who had the honor of getting out the last one. Naturally.

"Careful, careful!" Hayner hissed, looking behind him. "Don't just let it fall."

"Yeah, yeah." He didn't know how long it had been, but the rest of them might start waking up real soon. Maybe he was selfish. He didn't want them crawling after him or Seifer, piggybacking on their freedom.

With satisfying clunk number a million and a half, their impromptu screw driver absolutely warped and effectively useless, the last screw came out and the metal plate covering freedom – didn't budge.

"What the hell?" Seifer growled, prying at the corner. "Fuck! Why isn't it working?"

"They can't have welded it or anything," Hayner added. "There'd be no point to the bolts. Maybe they glued it?"

Pause. "Yeah, okay. You pull on that side, I'll pull on this."

Nodding, Hayner dug his fingers as well as he could around the edges, gripping with his fingernails. Thoughts of gangrene drifted into and out of his mind hazily. There was no way this worked anyways.

Through some nonverbal urge they started to pull at the same time, krrshk, and with a slight sticky sound the thing cracked off, taking some chunks of dry wall with it. Must have been rotten all the way through. Funny how things went like that.

There were four more screws, looser and untouched by any amount of mint green paint, keeping on the actual cover of the vent. Three minutes later they had gained their freedom, though it was dead and rotting from the inside out. The inside of the vent was so cold to the touch it burned, and older than the dust coating its every surface. The opening was just big enough for them, by some curious stroke of luck, which just made him more suspicious. This can't possibly work. It's so fucking little kid.


And so, Seifer Almasy and Hayner Conway began to crawl down the freezing tunnel, away from one of their longest homes in the last few years. And again, they found themselves abandoning what little stability they'd had. In both boys settled the heavy knowledge that they would never see those people again. Sat weighty like a rock on top of a big fucking mountain, it did. What were their names? Did they have names, most of those girls? All Hayner could think of was that one girl, leaning against the wall with her two friends, and her twisted smile.

He crouched in the vent, Seifer behind him. Hands and knees, and though his pants gave him a little insulation, his palms were bare. It was crawling through a freezer choked with dust. It had not been so bad at first, not nearly, the sort of 'I can handle this' bullshit running through his head. But cold crept. It started as a thin sheet on the dead layer of your skin like an infection and tendrils spiraled upwards, cell by cell. The way that water could crack stone by freezing in a crevasse. He felt his skin crack with the cold, numb him in a bad way.

Scrch. They proceeded through shuffling. Put your arms forward, then pull the rest of your body, and hope you came to an opening at some point.

Seifer was the first to talk.

"Can we stop for a sec? I'm freezing."

"So?" Hayner's teeth were chattering, of course. "Keep moving. Keep your blood flowing. Stopping will make you c-colder."

"Just…" Seifer bit his lip and thunk, set his head against Hayner's hip. "Fuck, you're warm," he muttered. He snorted and moved to press his head on Hayner's thigh.

"What the hell!"

"What? It's helping both of us. Just hang on ten more seconds and be glad I'm not fondling your ass or whatever."

"Why the fuck would you ever have to fondle my ass!" Hayner felt like he was about to start giggling wildly, like this was the grown-up version of bantering about homework with Olette. Seifer snorted and drew back.

"Okay. Keep moving now. There might be something up ahead."

"And once we do reach another vent that leads outside," Hayner said, having had this on his mind for a few minutes, "Which is, of course, covered by something or over which will be screwed on from the other side, how do you propose we get the hell out of here?"

He jolted his leg when Seifer flicked it, though trying to curl up on yourself was sort of impossible now, and said nothing in response to: "We'll get to it when we get to it."

God.

Seifer.


They did get to it when they got to it, which was, in fact, much sooner than expected. They got to it within about fifteen minutes – and a good thing, too. Hayner's knees were so cold he couldn't feel them anymore; he had started to think they were popsicles. Or not attached to his body, or something. He was making up hideously morbid games that could only be played when you couldn't feel your skin anymore. Like, how many times did you have to bang your arm against a concrete pillar before you would start feeling pain in that extremity again? Or like, how long can my right thigh last in a blazing fire before I have to pull it out. Because Hayner's right thigh would really not mind being thrust into a blazing fire at the moment.

"Oh fuck," Seifer hissed. "Oh fuck, lamer, please tell me that's a vent opening up ahead. Please tell me that thing leads outside. I'm so cold my balls are in danger of freezing off."

"Nice imagery."

"Well, I'm just warning you 'cause I knew you'd miss them."

Resisting the childish urge to bang his head against the side of the vent, Hayner crawled a little faster towards what Seifer said was an exit – might've been an exit? Whatever it was was better than being stuck where they were.

Maybe.

Hahaha.

That was another thing Seifer liked to say. "This grass on the other side of the fence is only greener 'cause it's fake! I bet you anything. Stop complaining and eat your dumpster diving dinner."

Panting with the effort, he crawled like an Olympic inchworm. Ready to take the gold in escaping from freezing-ass vents. It grew closer by degrees, smaller, smaller, smaller degrees: he imagined it as a finish line, even if he wasn't racing anyone. It did not seem to get closer for the longest time.

Imagine unscrewing a bolt. They generally don't appear unscrewed until the fifth or sixth rotation. The exit, too, seemed very, very far away until it didn't anymore.

One and a half feet tall by two feet wide. Metal slits, looking out onto verydeadgrass and those little silver maple trees that never got big enough to be impressive. Was that a forest, or just a line of trees? He couldn't tell, and bobbing his head up or down to get a different angle just blocked his view entirely.

"Well?" Seifer's word was harsh.

"Well what?"

"Can you get it open?"

Hayner pushed at it with his hands, then pulled, then tried his elbows, finally his head (which left him with a dull, pounding pain radiating from a line on his parietal bone). The bitterness was that he could feel it start to give, and that he could feel his arms would not be enough to push it through. The four weak screws keeping the vent cover on must have rusted from being outside so long.

"Shit," he observed.

"…is 'shit' Hayner-speak for 'No, Seifer, I cannot seem to open the vent cover, because despite having been subjected to every kind of physical strain that you have been subjected to for the last five years, and eating vegetables so fucking healthy we literally harvested them from the ground, I still have tiny weak little girl arms'?"

"God, you know what? Fuck you."

"Yeah, good luck with that, seeing as how we're totally stuck unless you can get that thing open."

Pang. It was like a pebble dropped through a tube in his heart. It rattled around the cavity and ruptured vital things. He hadn't thought of that. The vent was too narrow. They couldn't inch backwards; it wasn't tall enough. They were stuck. Foreverevereverever, here. Even if they could move backwards, they couldn't do turns backwards. Even if they could do turns backwards, they'd put the cover of the vent back over in that room. They would die in the vents. Legitimately die, as mummified corpses, because nothing lived here. Cold and frozen with their eyes wide open.

"Oh God," he choked.

"Hayner?"

"Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God."

He thought about it, both of them dying. Maybe Hayner's hands would still be extended, still trying to open the vent. And the next kids to try and escape through the vents ran into their frozen, dead bodies, and they too died, stuck. It would build up, years and years of frightened children trying to escape, blocked by the corpses of those before them, until finally someone would pull the cover off that vent and see a pair of stiff feet sticking out, and realize that years and years ago at the front of that frightened line of children were the first.

Fwip, fwip, fwip, pang. Different parts of his chest were tied together with string. The strings were tightened. It was like a corset around his heart.

"Oh my God, Seifer – " he squeaked, too far gone to care about his tone.

"Hey! Hey. Calm down, okay? Hayner. Calm down. We can figure this out."

He felt like he was going to start crying. Figure it out! It was easy to figure out. Hayner was just too fucking weak to let them escape. Too fucking weak to do something that would've been easy as shit for Seifer. It was his fault for going first.

Rationalizing anything had become second nature to him. Not, not rationalizing – maybe high school would have given him a better word for it. But making things seem okay. Settling. It will be okay like this. I don't mind it like this; it doesn't have to get better for me to be satisfied. I do not mind that all of the buildings are turning into dirt. It will be enough, if I die here.

He couldn't make this better, he could not be satisfied with dying in a tube, he could not it-will-all-be-okay this situation. Which was ultimately why he couldn't breathe.

"Come on, now. Come on." A solid, warm weight on the back of his thigh. He wondered if it was Seifer's head or Seifer's hand but focused on it anyways. "Don't go batshit on me, slacker. I need you right now."

Hayner gasped and let the collapsed tube in his heart re-inflate, breathing out long and low through his nose. "Alright."

"You good?"

With pursed lips, he was quiet until Seifer spoke again.

"There's got to be a way out. I don't have that crushed hope feeling yet." Nervous laughter.

"I could – try turning around in the vent. I'm pretty sure that if I could just push with my feet…"

"Yeah – yeah, and I could push you from behind, too. You're almost there just with hands, right? A little more force oughtta do it."

Wondering how, exactly, he was supposed to turn around in this situation only bred more crushing of the tube in his chest. He abandoned the notion and thought about the best way to do this. On top, he had maybe three or four inches of space above his head at most. If he scrunched up on one side of the vent, he might eight or nine inches on the side, absolute maximum. Yeah. Yeah, he could work with that, if he didn't panic.

"Okay," he said, mostly for himself. He sucked in his stomach, though he couldn't imagine that would help at all, and pressed his back to the ice that was the side of the vent. His shoulder touched the ceiling, pushed it up just that tiny amount. But if it could bend, if this metal could bend, that would only…help.

"Try going one leg at a time," Seifer advised. Hayner got his first glimpse of the blond for the first time in forever, his hat pulled down over his ears and his hair tickling his eyes. He looked in worse sorts than Hayner felt, which was saying something.

"Yeah."

Bring up the top leg first, scrunched up with the tootightboot pressed against the opposite wall. The building groaned like it could feel its two blond kidney stones pressing against its innards. His leg pushed on the wall. The wall pushed on his leg. He felt like it was going to explode, like his knee would crack and his shins would fall off, so he inched that foot forward and again forward until now the stretching crack feeling settled on his thigh. It was awful. He kept going.

Thunk, finally, when that leg made it to the other side. One down, one to go. This one was, naturally, a little more awkward – being underneath, and all, and what with the other leg straight and bent towards his nose in the way – but he inched it forwards, too, and felt that same pain.

It was funny, though. That pain reassured him that he was doing it right.

And then he wasn't. His leg stopped moving. Right leg was on the other side, stretched up and out of the way, back to the side of the vent, and his left leg squished between his body and the other side and – and – it wouldn't - !

Hurt, too.

"Oh God, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck –"

"Hayner!" Setting his wide eyes on Seifer's face again. This face he knew. Okay. "What is it?"

"Stuck," he heaved.

"…a-" the long, windy noise of exhalation out of his nose. Seifer reached forward with his hand, balancing on his other arm.

Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit!

It wasn't fair!

He had this one thing to do, this one thing Seifer was barred from doing, and he couldn't. And he managed, somehow, to make Seifer help him every step of the way.

He didn't. want. to.

With a heave, Seifer shoved Hayner's foot away from the wall and helped him to unfold and lie on his belly. Their noses touched, when they did this, and Hayner gave himself a moment to just feel alright about it. To think that Seifer had a perfect space right between his eyebrows, with no ugly pores or anything.

"Here we go, Hay," he smirked, and Hayner pinched his lips together.

He pressed his feet and his tootightboots against the vent, felt the metal just give in the middle. And, like tripping awake in his sleep, his kick was sudden and fierce. BANG! He scared himself, because it sounded almost like a gunshot. He felt the push back against his feet but could not see if the cover had fallen off fully. His shins rattled and his skull buzzed.

"Fuck! Seifer, I can't tell, did that work?"

"Damn, lamer. That's two today. First that shit with the key and now this."

"What? Did it work?"

Seifer smirked. "You're fucking ridiculous." For the life of him Hayner couldn't reply – what did you say to that? Honestly. What the hell did you say to that? He didn't mean it as an insult, but he probably hadn't meant it as a compliment.

"Did it work?"

"Yeah. I'll push you backwards, you just try not to fall on your ass this time. This can't be more than a few feet off the ground." It was with this little warning that Hayner began to slide backwards, until his feet popped out (damp, and cold air on your ankles never felt this good before), then knees, his ass grazing the top of the shaft so he could swing his lower half down. And down and down, until tootightboots touched dirt, and the rest of his body slid out to fit straight onto his hips. He felt like a folding chair, unfolded.

"Comin' out head first!"

Hayner laughed and helped him down.


It was fast, the escape. The sun had stretched to early afternoon, and no later; shadows minded themselves and kept close to their origins.

The building was old. All of the buildings were old. Cracks creeped up their sides like branching trees. Lichen crawled across their damp bricks.

"So, what now?" Hayner said to the open air, Seifer running his tongue along the inside of his cheek, arms folded, leaning against the wall. He looked dubiously at the vent cover, hanging by one screw and screeching with rust.

"What 'what now'? We're out."

"Yeah. So what do we do now?"

"What we usually do." Seifer spit into the grass to his left, smacking his lips and unfolding one arm to scratch at his forehead. "Why? You have some grand revenge scheme? Get real, slacker."

Hayner yawned (felt the crack and the brief deafness of an imaginary balloon expanding in his mouth), stuck his hands in his pockets. "I don't – Jesus, come on. You can't expect to stay here and just have everything be fine, do you? We're scapegoats for something. So we're obviously easier to catch than whoever actually killed the – the, uh – " Was it still a person, that broken down?

"Man?" Smirk.

"Yes, okay. (Asshole.) My point being they'll just come catch us again if we stay here! And it's not like we've got anything to stay for."

They could…probably make it. If they stayed, they could avoid Marluxia and his men. They could, right? Nobody knew their names. Just a couple of guys with ratty clothing. One of them was blond and one of them had a hat. That couldn't track someone down. It couldn't.

But they'd…been there so long. Never moving. Living in the same four square miles for five years but never sleeping in the same place twice. Never moving and surrounded always by brick and steel and brick.

God, he was so scared all the time, scared of everything, scared of dying tomorrow or living the day after, scared of Seifer hating him and of hating Seifer, scared of never leaving this place, ever, and scared scared so scared so terribly horribly knee-shakingly head-tinglingly stomach-crunchingly frightened out of his mind of leaving. What if it was even worse out there?

What if it was even better and they didn't want him?

"Yeah, but…what would we leave for?"

"I just – "

"Where would we go? How would we get there? Where would we sleep while we went there? What would we eat? How would we know when to stop? You gotta think these things through, Hay."

"Why?"

Seifer blinked and stepped forward a little, thought better of it and stopped moving. "What?"

"Why think it through? We never did before. You telling me you knew how to get out the minute we got locked into that room? Or that we never got up in the morning not knowing where we'd go back down? We'll survive…we'll survive."

And Seifer, he didn't say a thing.

"It's what we do. So let's just – do it somewhere else."

His only person looked the way Hayner felt. He'd sucked his stomach in a little bit, hunched over the cavity with hands in his pockets, the smallness of his once-oversized shirt now not even coming past his belly button.


"And lonely as it is that
loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it
will be less -
A blanker whiteness of
benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to
express.

They cannot scare me with
their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars
where no human race is.
I have it in me so much
nearer home
To scare myself with my own
desert places."
- Robert Frost


A few minutes' debate brought them to the same conclusion. The train tracks were a stupid way to walk; they led to fuck all, probably a train station or something. And what good was a train station with no trains? It was probably built where it was for the view. Views were nice but they didn't feed you.

The river, they decided. Seifer Almasy and Hayner Conway were going to follow along the river, though it had witnessed the murder of the man in that body, and flowed like thick molasses until at least a mile outside the city (they had never been any further).

They walked alongside the black sludge as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and Hayner harbored secret dreams that in twenty minutes they would come around one of these twisty curves and run right into a rural fishing village. A kindly couple would take them in and they would fish together for a while, and bathe with soap. They would come away from it smelling like shampoo and having eaten macaroni and cheese. They would take hot showers and afterwards curl up under blankets with really bad action novels – the kinds with names like Alex the Teenage Spy – and let the freshly acquired heat resonating in their bones get trapped inside the blanket like a warmth cocoon. They would sleep for nine hours every single day.

His feet were sore and he was pretty sure the skin of a burst blister was rubbing against the shoe and the raw skin of his heel. His head felt swelled up like a balloon and one of his ears was clogged. The muscles in his arms shook, still, from the effort it had taken to crawl through the vents; he had to pee really badly.

But he kept walking. Seifer was walking, and he could walk just as long as Seifer. Right above his butt his spine was starting to ache, like he'd sat funny for too long.

It was loud in a forest. They weren't anything like he'd thought. Wind didn't rustle leaves gently. It was like maracas filled with sand, they were so loud.

He had, after a few minutes of the walking, fallen into a sort of beatless rhythm with his own mind. Each footfall was a syllable and his tootightboots sunk just a little into the mud by the river bank. Every once in a while they passed by a real big log or a funny mushroom or a rock in the path (and his eyes stayed on the ground, the whole time on the ground tracing everything and looking for the stable places and numb to the colors and the things). His gaze was drawn to these – he wanted to roll the log over and look for salamanders or frogs or anything, really – but Seifer didn't stop to roll over logs.

Standing still and walking at the same time. His legs moved on automatic, his arms halfway extended for balance. It was hard to think when so many parts of your body were sore; Hayner couldn't tell if this was a good thing. Seifer had said something about this a year in.

"The way I see it – see, you never really find these totally poor dying people in Africa complaining about the purpose of their lives or some shit. They just want to survive. So if we're always so concerned with – with surviving, if we're always hoping the cuts on our legs don't slow us down or whatever. If we're hungry and won't last another day without food, you kinda just stop caring about anything else. Like, think about it. You remember in fourth grade or whatever when everyone really started wanting to fit in and shit? And popularity is some big thing. But now it's like, it's like, fuck that. Who the fuck cares about whether anyone likes you? Who the fuck cares about anything if you're gonna die? It's perspective, chickenshit. God. Oh my god. I sound like such a fucker. Punch me in the face if I ever sound like that again."

Hayner couldn't think of anything to say. What did you say to that? He'd never put any thought into it at the time. All he could think was to agree with Seifer. But Seifer had said that thing at the end, and Hayner just didn't know what to say, so he hadn't said anything at all. That sort of thing had happened a lot. Hayner didn't know what to say to Seifer and eventually Seifer stopped saying things.

What helped, when you were distracted by your own pain, was to distract yourself with the other things too. Hayner lived outside of his head. It was so dark inside. He filled his eyes up with the way the sun hovered interminably at a forty-five degree angle to the ground and searched it out between the leaves of the trees.

After a good while walking – he paid attention, really well, and the shadows of branches got longer on the ground so it had been hours or something, right? – he began to think of ways to stop. Excuses that he had not already used. The worst part about going to a relative's house when you were ten years old was waiting for the meals, because they liked to eat at about seven in the morning, then no lunch until two o'clock, and dinner happened just about whenever with no regard for the size and consistency of a little boy's stomach. This was the same thing in that way: avoiding a problem without looking like a lazy pig.

They'd already gone to the bathroom once.

Alright. So I ask him if we can go bathe in the river. Winter's never been all that cold, at least, it doesn't snow, so the water can't be that freezing. Yeah. I'll ask him.

Seifer swung everything when he walked (and Hayner, who walked behind him, noticed this all the time). His arms, his legs, his shoulders, his hips. But his spine was straight and his head held high.

I'll ask him on the count of ten.

I'll ask on the count of thirty.

When he got to twenty-three, Hayner asked, "Seifer? It's getting pretty late. I say we wash some crap off in the river and call it a night."

Seifer slid the hat off his head and wrung it between his hands, glancing at the river. It ran smooth and deep. "Sleep where?"

"Here. On the grass, or whatever." Adding 'or whatever' was good because it made it seem like you didn't care what was going on.


They undressed quietly and quickly, with no shyness to deter them. Hayner wiggled out of his pants, cast them on top of a rock, and waited for Seifer to finish. The banks here were steep, and there was no carefully acclimating yourself to the coldness of the river – you just had to jump and hope for the best. He stilled himself and breathed.

Bootless feet felt better than anything had for a long time. It was one dream that could come true, on a separate and lower run from soap and hot showers and instant noodles. Dreaming of letting your feet expand from their cages. Ah, god, grass on blistered toes damp from freezing rains, his outside world of detailed sated for once.

"Are you waiting for something or what?"

"No. No, just thinking." He stretched his toes out against the soil to expose their insides. Breezes from the water, god.

"About what? You were the one who wanted to go swimming." Seifer stretched his neck to either side harshly, raising his arms above his head and grabbing one hand with the other. A long, thin rash traced his spine with red blotched, but Hayner said nothing because nothing could be done about it. These things, more often than not, went away.

"Whatever," Hayner snorted, and as soon as he saw Seifer take a step towards the river jumped in himself – first. The water stung at the blister on his feet. God. Seifer leapt in a second later, swam forward and underneath. Hayner's foot brushed against the hair of his head. He reeled back, rose up to gasp for breath and pushed the hair away from his face. The water, though, it flowed past his body and caught on his back like and underwater sailed. It pushed him forward some tiny bit until Seifer popped up in front of him.

"Not as cold as I thought," he confessed. "It is still January, right?"

"Think so. I mean, I'm just going by what that kid said. Remember him?"

"It was this morning, so yeah," Hayner's insides recoiled at the tone of his voice. "Of course I do. He said it was New Year's a while back, which makes sense 'cause those fucking Christmas songs were playing the day we were – "

"Yeah." Hayner didn't want to hear the rest of the sentence. He knew what Seifer was going to say and it didn't need to be said. "It feels warm for January."

"Feel warm for February, too." Laughing, Seifer dove back under the surface of the black river water.

"It's slower the further away we get," Hayner said to himself, and dunked under. He missed entirely the open mouth and wrinkled nose on Seifer's face, missed the mouthing of "the fuck is with you today?" He was too busy floating underwater, where bubbles caught under his hair tickled their way to the surface (it was fingers running from the base of his skull to the top of his forehead, but smaller and safer and not human thankgod).

Could you open your eyes under water? His dad had never told him about that. He'd said "opening your eyes underwater in the pool will make them red" but nothing else, nothing about ponds or lakes or rivers. Would those turn your eyes red? Would they poison you?

When Hayner opened his eyes he saw bubbles again, so he shut them right away and clamped two fingers over his nose. When he tried again the world was brown and fuzzy and tiny white things floated in front of him, and when he looked down it was far down. So, so far down, twice his height at the very least. He'd had dreams like this. They weren't underwater. They were flying, and he didn't have to pinch his nose shut to see. But the idea was just the same, regardless. Rocks, dark with long brown strings of algae undulating lazily. Any place bare was covered with sand and dotted with dark green plants like stretched blades of grass. Mostly it was these, the wavy dark green things which made the bottom look like it was made of a thousand tiny fish all moving in unison. There were real fish, not dark green, not long and surging with the water but silver like darts, banded together by tens or twenties which swelled when they had nowhere to go and arranged themselves into an arrow when the river threatened to wash them away.

He floated above Atlantis, brown and green and drab and maybe not the most beautiful thing he'd seen in eleven years but certainly exciting in possibility.

The little kid in him wanted to snatch at the silver fish and hold them in his hands so that he could see their opalescent eyes and count every tiny scale. A thing that lived underwater seemed so fragile.

Beneath him on the floor of the river, the kelp swerved and twitched violently in front of his eyes, and the twitching and swerving moved through and out until the edge of a broad lunar tail was exposed. With a powerful beat of that tail it disappeared again and stopped moving, the kelp settling around it.

Unsettling.

Hayner stuck his head above the water again with a gasp, his lungs inflating like paper bags, and was not alone anymore. Seifer was maybe than ten feet away. His hair was slicked back with wet, and he was watching Hayner with no small curiosity.

"See anything down there?" he asked.

"You didn't look?" It was rare for Seifer to honestly ask Hayner's opinion about something. He'd probably seen something and wanted to know if Hayner had seen it. Ass.

"Nah," came the reply. "I was trying to wash all this shit off my arm. I think I got some dust or something from the vent on it. Isn't that weird? You never see dust outside. I mean, in the air you do, but it never lands on anything. Not even in caves. I guess the wind keeps it from staying."

"Maybe."

"Yeah."

"…there are some fish."

"How big?"

"Most of them were maybe the size of your hand. They were about that long. Skinnier, though." His arms and legs made circles in the water while he paddled to stay still.

Seifer wrinkled his nose and looked down at the water right underneath his chin. From above it was black, just black. "That's not very big," he said like it was Hayner's fault the fish were so small. "Should we bother to try and catch any?"

Hesitating a little on part of the tiny twisting in his stomach and the ringing in his left ear where the water had not quite drained, Hayner added, "I think I saw a bigger one down there. It wasn't the same kind. I just saw the tail but it was – I mean it was really big. I think it was like an eel or something and the tail was this thick." He held up his thumb and forefinger four inches apart.

Eyebrows raised and mouth smiling, "Why didn't you say that in the first place? Aw, that'd be awesome. Okay. Where was it?"

"Under the plants. I dunno if we'll be able to find it again. As soon as it stopped moving in the grass I couldn't see where it was."

"We could drop a heavy rock and scare it out. If you do that I could try to chase it into a corner."

He folded his arms across his bare belly, then unfolded them because he couldn't do that and stay floating – he was a little hungry, sure, but definitely not something he couldn't handle. And they'd already done so much today, why bother? The fish lived here. It would be here tomorrow. Would Seifer understand?

No.

Better safe than sorry, anyways.

People are like that.

"It's getting really dark," he said, pointing to the sky. "I don't think it'd be a good idea, especially since it's probably a pretty big fish. It might be dangerous if we can't see it at all. If – I mean, I guess." He left it open for correction. For 'it's just barely getting dark, you wuss' and 'let's do it before midnight, then. Honestly, lamer.'

"Fine." His voice was clipped, but Seifer pushed past Hayner over to the edge of the river. Hayner followed suit, reluctant to leave the weightless place and reluctant to regain the pulling burden of his lower body.

(Had he ever actually learned to swim? Had he not forgotten in the eleven years since? How had he known? Why hadn't he drowned? Why hadn't he drowned?)

His clean pink feet touched soil and got dirty again; so did his hands and his thighs and his knees. Clean was a temporary thing.

"Here, get your clothes," Seifer ordered, and threw Hayner's pants at his head. "We should clean them up if we're going to stop here for the night."

Hayner grabbed his shirt off the ground and walked back over to the river, but did nothing until Seifer came up behind him with his own clothing in tow. He didn't know what he was supposed to do, exactly.

Silent, Seifer kneeled in nothing but his skin and the grime the river couldn't wash off, and dunked his coat. The white fabric drifted listlessly beyond his hands and the dark stains of water spread to the whole thing. He started to scrub it against itself, vigorous, twitching the fine tendons in his wrists. Hayner did the same with his camo pants, getting at the areas with the grease stains or the blood. The spots didn't go away, but the crustiness did. He sat his bare ass down on the ground and dangled his legs in the water, using the wet shirt like a towel to clean off his calves and feet before washing it out again.

When they were finished, they put their clothes on the grass and spread them out to dry, and lay down to dry themselves off.

It was much more than quiet. Things made noises, tiptoed across stones, splashed, croaked, whispered with insect wings. Hayner felt like he didn't belong here, and rolled his head to the side to look at Seifer.

If he wasn't talking, Seifer was beautiful. He was masculine, sure. But beautiful. His ribs were carved solidly in his chest, like hills and valleys on his sides. A line down the middle of his stomach was proof of his physical strain, the same for the bumps of his arms and the line of his thick neck. Hayner was afraid to let his eyes go any lower.

"It's freezing," Seifer said. Having a voice come from this perfectly still body with eyes closed was unnerving.

"It's not that bad."

"It is too. Don't be an asshole. It always feels colder once you get out of the water." Hayner didn't say anything. He could think of nothing to say. "I can't go to sleep, because I'm too cold," Seifer said. "But I can't put on the clothing, either, because it's wet and that'll make me colder."

"So don't sleep."

"What am I supposed to do? Stare at the sky for three hours?"

Hayner shivered and sat up. He stared at the sky. Were there always so many stars? That couldn't be right. There were supposed to be maybe a hundred or so. There were too many.

He looked back down, because the black outlines of the trees were scaring him. He put his forehead against his knees.

There was a snort a foot and a half away, and Seifer sat up, frowning. "Hey," he said softly. "You draw on my back if I draw on yours?"

There again, the little twist in his belly. "Sure. You first. Turn around."

His knees folded in, Seifer turned his back to Hayner and held still, his muscles tensed. Hayner thought for a second, then put the tip of his forefinger to Seifer's skin and began to draw.

"There. What was that?" Seifer shivered under his finger. The warmth was probably weird, since he was so cold.

"Did you draw a smiley face on my back? Lame."

"Tch. You liked it." He regretted the confidence in his words.

"Whatever. Keep going, it feels nice." Hayner did, dragging his finger across the skin, damp and tanned and cold, unsure about even this much contact. They did this sometimes, just because. It was an unspoken agreement. Sometimes they needed to, so they just did and the end of the day when they couldn't sleep. Like a brief interlude of friendship. "No homo," as Seifer insisted just once.

Snort. "Chickenwuss, did you seriously just write 'you suck' on my back?"

"Yeah." With a smirk, Hayner gave up on symbols or words. He went to patterns, tracing swirls or straight lines or the bumps of Seifer's spine, because the point was it felt really nice. All the while the shivering, because, Hayner suspected, Seifer was ticklish and they usually did this with clothes on.

They switched after a while. Hayner didn't shiver. Maybe he wasn't cold enough. Maybe he wasn't ticklish. He wouldn't know. But god did it feel wonderful. Just one finger on his back. He could go on with just that, as long as he had something, some sign they didn't hate each other.

It would have been enough. To die like that, with Seifer drawing letters on his back. It would have been enough.


A/N: No DiZ and the crawlspace jokes. I'm begging you guys. 3:

And I know kelp doesn't grow in fresh water. And that it isn't a plant. Like I actually really actually know.