Children of the Mirror

...21st Part: Dark...

I kissed him! Why the hell had I kissed him?

I spent all day wondering about this, as we walked on. We found a road, but there wasn't any sign of making it to another patch of civilization anytime soon. I'd give it until the day after tomorrow to come at least over the horizon, this place the road lead to. Man, I wished again I had my motorcycle.

Maybe it was because of the point he'd made, I thought. But even then, the action shouldn't have been so instantaneous. Sudden impulse just... caught hold of me or something. That was the only explanation for it. And there begs the question... Why the impulse?

Krad's words echoed in my head again: 'People who have been together as long as we have can't truly hate each other like that, can they!?'

And then from the dream, that evil angel's despair: 'Those of us who don't have our own forms... nothing we hope for... nothing we wish for... will ever be granted to us!'

And then, for some reason, Shakespeare: 'Let me speak a little! This youth that you see here I snatched one half out of the jaws of death, relieved him with such sanctity of love, and to his image, which methought did promise most venerable worth, I did devotion!' That one I couldn't understand if I tried.

None of it made sense. Would it ever?

Krad, who walked right at my side, looked to be thinking just as deeply. His eyes squinted slightly in a look that made him seem in pain. "Dark?" He caught my stare.

"It's nothing," I said lamely.

He knocked my arm with the back of his hand. "Of course it's nothing – that's why you look so confused," he said sarcastically. "What is it really?"

I smirked a little. "Do you need a reason for every time I look at you?"

Krad raised one of his blond eyebrows at me. "Should I need one?"

"Nope."

"Alright."

That might have been the most ordinary and most awkward conversations we'd ever had. We walked on in silence after that, hardly saying a single other word for the rest of the day.

. . .

Krad set up the fire for us, as always. "Do you think we'll reach anywhere by tomorrow?" he wondered.

"Day after," I told him my estimate.

"Hmm." He poked at the flames some more once it got going and this time, rather than sitting on the opposite side of the blaze, he came to rest next to me. We still didn't dare touch each other, but we were closer, vicinity-wise.

There was never a time I was this awkward around any of my girlfriends – at least, not that I could remember. I couldn't tell what he was thinking when he looked at me. It was all clouded up by the dreams. The dreams had some kind of a warning hidden in them, but I couldn't decipher it. It was either: 'Don't make the mistake of ending up like this' or the opposite: 'Get him before he gets you'. They both sounded a little skeptic-worthy.

Whatever the case, I was getting a serious headache from all of it.

I felt something fall against my shoulder, then, and when I glanced over to see what it was, the first thing I saw was a mass of blond hair. Krad had fallen asleep and was leaning against me, on the verge of tipping over.

I just gazed at him for a while, contemplating it. When did we stop hating each other – if we ever truly had? And what were we to each other now?

I really needed all the philosophical questions to stop.

Wrapping my arm around Krad's shoulders, I tipped him carefully onto his back before lying down next to him, straightening his sleeve absently until I, too, fell asleep.