Nothing much really happens in this chapter, it's just kind of a bonding and getting-to-know-each-other type of chapter that gives me an excuse to throw out a headcanon or two. Or three. Or ten. PX Anyway, yeah. Guys, you need to review! Seriously! It seems like Torry-Riddle is the only one who's been reviewing lately, I wanna hear from the rest of you, too!

I DISCLAIM!


"No, look me in the eyes and say it, Shilo, make me believe it."
"I am old enough to drink."

"No you're not."
"Yes I am."

"You're doing it wrong, you have to believe it yourself before you can make anyone else believe it. Again."

"I'm old enough to drink."
"You call that a lie?! A toddler could do better!"

"God, can't we just stop for now?"
"No! We do not stop! We are doing this until you can get it right, now look me in the eyes and do it!"

"I'm old enough to drink, I'm old enough to drink, I'm old enough to drink!"
"NEIN, NEIN, NEIN! You're not believing it, therefore I'm not believing it!"

"Wait, did you seriously just yell at me in German?"

Graverobber opened his mouth, but stopped short before any sound came out, thinking back on what he'd said and realizing that holy shit, she was right; he had yelled at her in German. They both burst into laughter. They were sitting on his bed together, and he was attempting to school her in the art of lying, something that he felt was absolutely crucial for her to learn, especially after what had happened with Amber in the alley recently.

"Shilo," he said, "the key is to make yourself believe it first. Once you convince yourself, it's almost too easy to convince others. So. You make yourself believe it, and once you've done that, the next thing you need to do for it to be believeable is be able to look the person directly in the eyes and tell them your lie without blushing, breaking eye contact, or anything else that might make it seem suspicious. Your voice cannot shake even the tiniest bit, you have to speak at a natural volume, not mumble under your breath where they can barely hear you, and the most important thing is to always remember which lies you tell to which people, otherwise it can turn into a complete disaster. And if for whatever reason you have to make up an entire story, you had better be able to remember every single miniscule detail, and it helps if you weave in some bits of truth, no matter how small a part they play in the overall thing, because it helps make it easier for you to keep track of the lie, you see what I'm saying?"

"What are some that you've told people before?" she asked.
"Well, let's see...Oh, I know. Okay, first of all, since you probably don't know this, the legal drinking age on this island is eighteen, right? And so one time, when I was about sixteen, I told Jem I was gonna be with Dixie that night, which was partially true. What I didn't tell her was that Dix was taking me to a bar to have my first drink. We both got totally wasted, I mean, I was so drunk I couldn't even see straight, and then we went to the old lighthouse and broke the lock on the door and just crashed there to sleep it off. I swear to God, to this day, I have yet to have a hangover anywhere near as intense as that one, it felt like my head had been run over by like a hundred fucking semi trucks. Wait a minute."

He leaned over and grabbed the list she'd given him off the nightstand. "I have an idea," he said. "I'm going to read something off the list, but instead of telling me if it's true or false like you normally would, I want you to tell me it's true, even if it's not, okay? I want you to look me in the eyes and say that it's true and make me believe you, even if it's complete and total bullshit. Okay, let's see...Your room was the only place in the house where there wasn't a portrait of your mom?"

"That's true," she said calmly.
He raised an eyebrow. "Is it?" he asked.
"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

"You swear it?"
"Cross my heart."

"Okay. Now tell me for real. Is that true or false?"
"That is complete and utter bullshit. There was a portrait of her hanging right above the mantle of the fireplace that was in my room, I could sit up in bed at night and look directly at it if I wanted to, and I used to have one-sided conversations with it when I was a little girl."

"Shilo?"
"Yeah?"

"You just made me believe that there wasn't a portrait of your mother in your bedroom."

"I...I did?"
"Kid, you did it, you just told your first successful lie!"
He held his hand up for a high five, and she gave it to him.

"Great job!" he said. "Okay, now if anyone outside of our friends and allies ask, your name is Crystal, alright? Last name isn't important and anyone who asks for it is probably gonna be trouble, anyway. You're nineteen years old, and if someone says you're too short to be nineteen, feel free to punch them if you want. Your dad was a doctor, and your mom had something repossessed when you were too young to remember. You got all that so far?"

"Yeah. What about you and I, what's our history?"
"We met when I was first starting out as a graverobber. You were visiting your mom's grave, and you saw me extracting from a corpse and threatened to report me, but I convinced you to keep your mouth shut by promising that I would stay away from your mom. After we went our separate ways, you got curious and eventually decided to try and find me again, so you started hanging out in the graveyard hoping I would come back, and when I did, we somehow ended up talking and wasting time and we clicked, and so we started hanging out more often and became best friends."

"I...How long did it take you to come up with all of this?"
"What, that? It was all just off the top of my head."

She stared at him for a moment. "Damn," she said, "you really are good at this, aren't you? Hey, since you read something off my list, can I ask about something from yours that I've been wondering about?"

"Absolutely, yeah."
"Is it true that you're near-sighted?"

"Sort of. I've got what's called mixed astigmatism, which means that I'm near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other. Check this out." He lowered his head, using his thumb and forefinger to spread one eyelid wide open and using the thumb and forefinger of his other hand to do something to the eye itself. He lifted his head, then held his hand out towards Shilo so she could see the contact lens that was resting on the pad of his index finger.

"No way," she said. "Seriously? You wear contacts?"
"Yeah, I have ever since I was like six years old," he replied. He tilted his head back and put the contact back in, blinking a few times until he couldn't feel it anymore. "Yeah," he said, "if you look real close, you can kind of see this faint circle around my iris where the edge of the contact is. See it?"

She leaned forward, hands on her knees, and peered closely at his eyes. "Yeah, I see it," she said after a moment.

"Holy shit, he's got gorgeous eyes, what the actual fuck?" she thought.

She remembered what he'd said, about how the only surgery he'd ever had was when Chris gave him new fingerprints, which meant that other than that small, rather unimportant detail and the dyed streaks of color in his hair, everything about him was totally natural. He was damn lucky. He had those beautiful blue eyes, that insanely expressive face, a smile that could be just as evil and wicked looking as it could be inviting and full of charm, he was the type of guy who could easily pull off having long hair, and to say nothing of his voice. And God, with the way he ate, should he really have a body like that? (Well, then again, he did do a lot of running to keep from being caught, so all the calories probably just ended up getting burned off because of that.)

In short, his genetics were definitely on his side. It didn't matter that he looked about ten years older than he was. He was fucking attractive, end of story. Hell, he was—and part of her could not believe she was actually applying this word to a man who lurked around in graveyards and sometimes slept in dumpsters, but—He was sexy. (Wow. That was actually kind of a bold thought for her. She could only imagine how Nathan would react if he knew that she was thinking that way, nevermind the fact that the thought was about a drug dealer with his face on wanted posters all over the city.)

"Earth to Shilo! Come in, Shilo! Do you copy?!"

She blinked and snapped out of it. "...What?" she said.
"You alright, kid?" Graverobber asked. "You weren't answering me."
"Huh? Oh, yeah, sorry. I guess I just kinda zoned out. What were you saying?"

"I asked if you wanted to see some of the shit in my closet. There's all kinds of interesting things in there, I don't use it for clothes."
"If you don't use it for clothes, then..."

"Clothes live in my dresser. The closet? The closet is used to store what I like to refer to as the junk-treasures of my forefathers. It's a bunch of random shit that belonged to my dead relatives. Old forms of media players that aren't even being made anymore, CDs with music by artist that have been dead for who-knows-how-long, old DVDs, old clothing like band t-shirts and stuff, old books and magazines and newspaper clippings, photographs, jewelry, posters...I think there's also a music box or two. The copy of Aesop that my mom used to read to us out of is somewhere in one of the boxes in here, I know that, I'm just not entirely sure which one, I'd have to go digging through them to figure it out."

As he was speaking, he had gotten up and gone over to the closet, opening it up and looking around at the clutter inside. Now, he bent over and picked up a cardboard box, bringing it with him back over to the bed and setting it down on the mattress before sitting back down. He reached into the box and pulled out an envelope, handing it to Shilo. "See what's in there," he said, and then started rummaging through the box to see what else he could find.

She opened the envelope and found that it was full of photos. In some of them, she recognized a teenage Graverobber from the picture he'd shown her during their conversation after her panic attack. She also recognized teenage Nick and Jem, as well as Graverobber's sister Natalie. She assumed the kids in some of the other pictures were the four of them when they were even younger. Then she came across one of him and two people she didn't recognize. It was a little strange, because he looked almost exactly the way he did now, minus the streaks of color in his hair, but the picture was more faded than the ones that had been taken when he was younger.

"Hey," she said, "who are these people you're with in this picture?"
He held his hand out and she gave it to him. He took one look at it and immediately shook his head.

"That's not me," he said.
"But it looks just like—"

"It's my uncle."
"...Oh. What about—"

"My parents. You know, it's funny. Dad and Uncle Zack had this big falling out with each other when I was a kid. He vanished from our lives when I was about five years old, all the pictures of him were gotten rid of. He didn't even show up to either of my parents' funerals. I thought for sure I'd seen the last of him, and yet here I am all these years later staring at this picture of him, probably the last one of its kind. God, I never realized how much I grew up to look like him. The Zack in this picture...I could pass as his twin, couldn't I?"

He stared at it for a moment, then began ripping it up.

"What are you doing?" Shilo asked.
He didn't even look at her as replied, "Burying the past."

And then he carelessly tossed the pieces up in the air and let them scatter, and that was the end of it.

Shilo continued looking through the photos while Graverobber kept on with his task of digging through the box. "Shilo, check this out," he said after a few moments. She looked up. He was holding out an open ring box, and inside was a silver ring with a winged heart. "It belonged to my godmother. Jem's mom. She gave the one with the rose on it to Jem and this one to Natalie. I didn't even know this was in here. I mean, I knew Nattie stopped wearing it after Miranda passed away, but I never knew or gave much thought to what she'd done with it. I guess now I know. You can have it if you want."

Her eyes flickered from the ring up to his face. "Seriously?" she asked.
He nodded. "Natalie obviously didn't care about it enough to keep it," he said, "and I'd rather it be worn than not, and I'm sure Jem feels the same, and so I bet that so would Miranda. And Jem really likes you. As in, like, a lot. She thinks you're the absolute bomb, no kidding. I'm sure she'd be completely thrilled to shreds if you wore this thing. Besides, I think it'd suit you. Simple, not too flashy or fancy or anything. I dunno, something about it just says 'Shilo' to me, you know what I mean? Seriously, kid, go ahead and take it, it's fine."

She hesitantly reached out, paused, then bit her lower lip and drew her hand back. Graverobber rolled his eyes, his shoulders trembling as he repressed a chuckle and shook his head. Then he reached across the space between them and gently took her hand in his, spreading her fingers out, then taking the ring out of the box and sliding it onto her finger. They both stared at it for a moment, the he smiled. "Perfect fit," he said.

Neither one of them could stop staring at their hands. He was holding hers gently by the fingers, the way a man typically held a woman's hand when he was about to kiss it. His hands were both exactly what she expected them to be, and at the same time, somehow, they weren't; they were rough and calloused, but they were also surprisingly gentle. They were big compared to hers, and warm, too, and his skin was several shades or so darker than hers was.

He blinked and pulled his away suddenly.

"So, um...anyway..." he said, and then returned to digging through the box. Shilo stared at the ring on her finger. He'd put it on the ring finger of her right hand, and she couldn't deny that she did like the way it looked. And he was right—it was a perfect fit. What were the odds?

"Oh, hey, look at this," Graverobber said. He lifted a photo album out of the box, a big dorkish grin on his face. He set it down in his lap and opened it up to a random page, then shook his head and laughed, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "God, I was like the least photogenic kid on the entire planet, look at this."

He turned the album so she was looking at it right-side-up, and she looked at the picture he was pointing to. It showed him as a kid sitting on his bed with his hair all messed up and in his face and his shirt off and some kind of gooey food remanants smeared around his mouth and all over his hands, which he was holding up in front of himself and staring at as if he'd never seen them before and they were foreign objects. Then her eyes were drawn to another picture, and she couldn't prevent a grin from spreading onto her face.

"Aww, Graves!" she said. "Look at you, you were such a cute baby!"
"Yeah, well, if that were a picture of me in the hospital right after I was born, you wouldn't be saying that. For the first few months or so of my life, my face was all red and squashed up and shit, it was not a pretty sight. Dunno what made my parents think it was a good idea to take pictures of me when I was like that, but such pictures do exist somewhere among all this stuff, possibly even in this album for all I know."

Shilo grinned at him, then turned the page. "Who's this?" she asked, pointing at one of the photos. Graverobber moved to sit next to her so they were both looking at things right-side-up and looked at the picture she was indicating.

"Oh, her!" he said. "Her name was Jamie...Sommers, I think? She used to live down the street from us, we were about the same age. She was my first crush. Yeah, she, uh...She had an older brother named Darren who thought Natalie was hot. He tried to flirt with her once and ended up getting a knee to the groin. She was actually the one who gave me the idea to dye my hair in the first place."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Yeah, we went down to this drugstore not far from where we lived, and she got this tube of neon pink hair dye for herself while I got like this bright, electric, Zydrate blue, and we agreed to do it, and so one day, when Mom and Dad weren't home and Nick and Natalie were too busy arguing with each other to even remembe I existed, I took it and gave myself what I swear to God was the absolute shittiest dye job ever known to man, and my fingers were stained blue, and I just sat on my bed with my hair in my face and blue all over my fingers, and when my parents got home, my mom came into my room, and God, I'll never forget. She took one look at me and started screaming at me. She said, 'Terrance Allan Zatovich, what in the name of heaven and hell and all that is holy did you do to your hair?!' And I just calmly said, 'Dyed it.' And she just ranted and raved and bitched and carried on and on and on...God, I'll never forget how pissed off she was about that. My dad didn't really give a shit, he just kinda shrugged and was like, 'Summer, the boy's old enough to decide for himself what he wants to do with his hair, stop making such a big deal of it.' And of course that got him in trouble, so...What? What are you grinning like that for?"

"Nothing. You're just full of really cool stories, that's all. I can't believe you're only twenty."
"Yeah, I know, I look—"

"No, it's not that, it's just...your stories and stuff just make it seem like you've lived a lot longer than you have because you've had all this stuff happen to you, you know?"

"'Life is short,'" Graverobber said, "'but made longer by suffering.'"

"That's...deep. Is that from Aesop?"
"Annabel. She read it somewhere once and quoted it to me and Isaac one time. It's stuck with me because of how true it is." He leaned forward and looked in the box, then let out a low chuckle that almost bordered on being dark. "OOOOOh, Shilo," he said. "It's in here."

"What is?" she asked. He looked at her over his shoulder, that signature wicked grin on his face.

"Aesop's. Fucking. Fables."

Shilo watched as from inside the box, he lifted a thick, old fashioned book bound in leather with the word's AESOP'S FABLES on the cover in gold lettering above an image that she couldn't clearly make out. Graverobber settled back into his place beside her and set the book down in his lap as she set the photo album aside for the time being, making a mental note to look through it some more later. He opened the book and thumbed through the pages, and the entire time, that evil Cheshire Cat grin never left his face. Shilo couldn't help but notice that the pages looked like they might be actual parchment, and it seemed as if everything had been handwritten with a fountain pen or a dip pen.

He stopped about a quarter of the way through and began to read, letting his voice drop into its baritone.

"'A Nightingale, which belonged to a person of quality, was fed every day with plenty of choice dainties, and kept in a stately cage. Yet, notwithstanding this happy condition, he was uneasy, and envied the condition of those birds who lived free in the woods, and hopped up and down, unconfined, from bough to bough. He earnestly longed to lead the same life, and secretly pined because his wishes were denied him. After some time, however, it happened that the door of his cage was left unfastened, and the long-wished-for opportunity was given him of making his escape. Accordingly, out he flew, and hid himself among the shades of a neighboring wood, where he thought to spend the remainder of his days in contentment. But, alas! the poor bird was mistaken; a thousand evils which he never dreamed of attended this elopement of his, and he was now really that miserable creature which before he had been only in imagination. The delicate food that he used to eat was no more; he did not know how to provide for himself, and was even ready to die with hunger. A storm of rain, thunder, and lightning filled the air, and he had no place of safety; his feathers were wetted with heavy shower, and he was almost blinded with the flashes of lightning. His tender nature could not withstand the severe shock; he even died under it. But just before he breathed his last he is said to have made this reflection: Ah, were I but in my cage again, I would never wander more.' And the moral of the story, my dear, is that liberty is most attractive to those who do not know its price."

When he was finished, Graverobber lifted his head to look at Shilo, only to find that she was facing away from him and had sort of curled in on herself. His smile faded. He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, but then it dawned on him that the story must have struck a chord with her. Hell, now that he thought about it, anyone who didn't know any better might even think it was a metaphor created specifically for her life. It was funny. He'd never really given much thought to the story before. It had always just been something that was there in his childhood that his mother had used to make him go to sleep. But to Shilo, despite that she'd never heard it before, it was clearly so much more than that.

"Shilo?" he said quietly. She didn't respond. He softly shut the book and set it down on the mattress beside himself, then got onto his knees and leaned forward, holding himself up with his hands as he got closer to her. "You wanna hear a secret?" he asked. She made a small grunting noise in response, which was as good an answer as any for him. "Remember when you said that I'm your best friend?" She nodded. He placed his lips right beside her ear.

"You're mine, too," he whispered.

He pulled back so that he wasn't so close, and she finally twisted around to look at him. God, what was it about when her eyes were wide like they were now? Why was it that it always managed to make her look just that much more beautiful to him?

"I am?" she asked. He grinned.
"The Lydia to my Beetlejuice," he said.

"...I'm assuming you're referring to their relationship in the spinoff cartoon and not the movie."
"Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the movie is great and all, but personally, I prefer the relationship in the cartoon way more."

"Besides Aesop," she said, "what's your favorite book?"
He had to think for several moments before he could answer that question.

"It's not a book," he said finally, "it's a series. The Odd Thomas books, by Dean Koontz. Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Deeply Odd, and Saint Odd, plus the short novel that takes place between the fourth and fifth books, Odd Interlude. There was also a movie released in 2013 starring Anton Yelchin."

"Who's Anton Yelchin?" Shilo asked.
"I could tell you...or I could show you," Graverobber replied.

"You've got the movie, don't you?"
"Not only that, I've also got the Star Trek movies he was in as Chekov."

"Your references are totally lost on me, Graves."
"Alright, that's it! Movie marathon, right now! Get your ass downstairs, we're watchin' Oddie and then we're watchin' the Star Trek movies! And after that, I am going to dig through anything and everything until I find those books so you can read 'em, 'cause kid, if you've never read Oddie, you don't know what you're missin'!"

"Why do you keep saying Oddie?"
"Because that's his nickname. Oddie."

"Odd's not his nickname?"
"You'll just have to watch the movie, read the books, and find out for yourself. But first...what about you?"

"What about me?"
"What's your favorite book? Or series?"

Shilo paused to think for a moment or so. "I love The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton," she said.
Graverobber nodded in approval. "Good choice, kid," he said. "Come on. Let's go watch those movies. And I'm telling you now, you might get kind of...attached to Yelchin."

"Attached how?"
"Well...Let's just say that Jem likes to refer to him as an, and I quote, 'adorable Russian puppy.'"

Shilo threw her head back and laughed, then took the hand he held out to her and followed him downstairs. And at the end of an hour and thirty-seven minutes, she was sitting with her head resting against Graverobber's shoulder and silent tears streaming down her face as the movie came to an end.

She even managed to catch a glimpse of Graverobber's tears before he wiped them away.


Anton Yelchin really is an adorable Russian puppy, and anyone who disagrees is wrong on every level and can get out. Also, yes, I'm a sucker for Odd Thomas. No, I haven't read the last book yet, I'm going to go get it soon, though. Oh, and also, everybody say "D'AWWWW, GRAVEROBBER, YOU REALLY DO HAVE A HEEEEEAAART!" n_n

Anyway, I'm spending the weekend with my dad at his new apartment, but I'm taking my laptop with me, so I'll still be able to work on writing the next chapter. :)