Several things happened in a split second, and in the sudden rush of pure adrenaline Even wasn't exactly sure what. A car. Lumaira in the road. The screech of tyres on tarmac. A scream. A dive, arms raised protectively, cries and the mad flash of insanity and instinct, and when the mist cleared Lumaira was gasping on the floor and Even's hands were splayed over the metal grille at the front of the car.

And it had crumpled and he hadn't.

As L'Erena sprinted over and grabbed Lumaira - shocked but uninjured - into a tight hug, Even carefully prised his hands away from the smoking wreck of the car. The driver, a middle aged man with hair too long, had rushed out fully ready to apologise profusely and presumably praying that there'd be no blood, saw the state of the bonnet and stopped, slackjawed. He searched for any object that could have caused such damage, and found none. Just three children in the middle of the road, one crying and being fussed over by the second, the third a foot or so in front of the car and looking quite comprehensively horrified, apparently by his own hands.

"Okay, what the hell happened?"

Even turned to look hopelessly at L'Erena, his eyes asking exactly the same question. Lumaira was babbling something about a car and Even running in front of it and there was lots of wild gesturing and wide eyes, presumably to compensate for the complete lack of sense.
L'Erena carefully stood and walked over to the car. It was unmistakeable, the definite hand-size dents in the ruined metal. She looked at it for a few minutes, then carefully turned to the frozen Even.

"Oh my God. You just totalled a car with your bare hands."

The wail of sirens was sounding in the distance as a crowd gathered around, pointing and staring and whispering. Even slowly stretched out his legs, looked at them all, and promptly passed out into a dead faint.

"-Amazing reports of a teenage boy destroying a car to save his friend! Here's the driver of the car, what happened?

I was driving along, just rounded the corner, then suddenly I saw this kid run into the road! Didn't have time to stop, thought I'd hit him then suddenly this other boy just ran in front of me and then the car jolted and next thing I knew I wasn't going anywhere! I ran outside to check if they were like, okay, and the kid that ran out was just standing in front of my wrecked car! There was nothing there to stop the car, just him an' his buddy!

Let's take a look at the car, and what looks like handprints dented into the metal! There's no way that any normal human being could do that kind of damage to a car going at thirty miles an hour. For legal reasons, the boy's name has been kept a secret - but what's his secret?

Even sighed as Lumaira reached over for the television remote and switched the overly enthusiastic news reporter off. On his lap was a newspaper article of exactly the same thing - Boy Stops Car With Bare Hands?

Even was sitting next to him, looking desolate. It had been two days since the incident with the car, and he'd not even come close to smiling since. Lumaira had quietly explained everything as best he could to Naminé the evening they arrived home and since then nobody in the house had uttered a single word about it. Now the Sunday paper had arrived with the headline splashed on the front and everybody at school was talking about it. Lumaira had been quizzed about it, but he just shook his head and lied that no, he didn't know anything more than anybody else did. L'Erena had the sense to say the same.

By now there were so many questions, even thinking about Even made Lumaira's head hurt.

Eventually, in the thickness of silence, he stood and made for the door.

"D'you want a drink?"

"Okay."

"Squash?"

"Sure."

Surreptitiously glancing at Even one last time, Lumaira nodded to himself in some sort of hopeless attempt at reassurance, and slipped out. Naminé was still in bed, due to get up in another hour or so, so soon he'd need to make her breakfast and his and Even's dinner. He did most of the cooking around the house, and enjoyed it.

Naminé, who knew what she was thinking? She must have assumed that Lumaira's insane babblings about what had happened were overexaggerations, but that was before she saw the photographs in the paper. At least the media had had the decency not to reveal Even's identity. That would have caused utter chaos.

Drinks poured, Lumaira returned to the sitting room where Even had tucked his knees up to his chin and was solemnly contemplating what must have been exactly the same thing as Lumaira. The pink haired boy gently passed him the full glass and sat down next to him.
"You did the right thing."

"I broke a car."

"You saved my life."

Even glanced up at Lumaira, who smiled with genuine gratefulness.

"Yeah."

And he returned to staring at a blank space on the wall in between blu-tacked paperwork from the hospital and psychedelic artworks by Lumaira, aged seven. It was a while before he spoke again.

"It's just... I didn't even think about it. Why would I run in front of a car? I couldn't stop a car. If I was thinking, I would have tried to shove you out of the way at least. But I didn't. I didn't, I tried to stop the car. And succeeded."

Lumaira sadly shook his head. If Even didn't understand, then Lumaira would never have a chance.

"Why would I even think I could stop a car? I can hardly even lift a crate."

"Maybe you subconsciously knew?" Lumaira suggested. "I mean, you wouldn't have been able to push me out of the way and then get yourself out in time."

"It wouldn't have mattered if the car ran me over," Even stated matter of factly. "I'm already dead."

"It would have mattered to me," Lumaira insisted. Even glanced at him through slits of squinting eyes. Lumaira wished he'd wear his glasses more, but he knew better than to try to press Even about it.

"It doesn't matter now. Neither of us were hurt."

"I guess so."

"Maybe you're a superhero," Lumaira said after a while. Even rolled his eyes.

"Superheroes don't exist."

Lumaira shrugged philosophically.

"I'm not ruling anything out any more. Maybe you're a vampire?"

"Trust me, I have no desire to bite your neck."

"Awh. I might like that."

There was a horribly awkward silence.

"Sorry," Lumaira finally apologised, redfaced. "That was inappropriate."

"You shouldn't joke about things like that," Even said quietly, blushing equally heavily.

"Yeah. Sorry."

Lumaira wanted to pull Even into a hug, but he figured that that would be a very bad idea. So the best thing to do was probably change the subject.

"Maybe you're... um... maybe you're an angel or something."

"That's just stupid."

"A robot?"

"Robots don't bleed."

"Maybe you're a cyborg, then."

"Don't be ridiculous."

Lumaira sighed.

"Even, you came back from the dead. Right now, nothing is ridiculous."

"You still somehow manage it."

At that, Lumaira giggled, thankful for some sort of distraction from his sheer idiocy. But eventually he sobered up, not least because Even was shooting him a disdainful glare.

"Well, there's obviously something different about you. It's not just some one off event, either, because your scars disappeared too and now you saved me, too."

Even nodded non-committally and turned back to the wall. Lumaira had no choice but to tug him off the sofa and into the kitchen, digging out a recipe book and flicking through it.

"Mum's diet is really weird," He said. "She eats dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner. But apparently that's actually better for you."

"It is. The first meal of the day sets up your metabolism, so if it's a big one your body programs itself to burn a lot of fat throughout the day, expecting more." Even rallied off. "That's why, if you want to loose weight, you skip dinner and not breakfast."

Lumaira, who'd been skimming through the spaghetti carbonara recipe, stopped suddenly and glanced up.

"It wasn't what you-" He began, and trailed off. He still wasn't ever sure what to do about things like that, just try to pretend they never existed, or seriously sit down with Even one night and talk things out. But Even interrupted him anyway, with a shake of his head.

"To be honest, logical thought hardly came into it."

Lumaira felt like he'd ruined the conversation, and gently laid down the recipe book before giving Even a hug.

"You'll be okay," He promised fiercely. "No matter what it takes, I'll make things better."

To his surprise, he felt thin arms lie tentatively across his back.

"Yeah," Even whispered, and for once he sounded genuinely grateful, "I know."

Lumaira peeled himself away to look at Even's face. He was squinting like always, but there was a little smile on his lips in between threads of tears silently dripping down his cheeks. So Lumaira smiled too as he reached up to brush them away with his thumb.
"Everything'll be okay. Now let's make spaghetti!"

"Way to ruin the atmosphere, Lumaira."

"I didn't ruin it! I just made it... more silly."

"You're good at silly, aren't you?"

"Very."

Tuesday was a half day and as soon as the last lesson ended L'Erena found herself dragged home by an overzealous Lumaira. Even was still at Lumaira's house as always, hanging the washing out in the back garden, and Lumaira was quick to join him. The pink haired boy's theories on Even had been slowly getting more and more outlandish since the incident with the car (which L'Erena was quietly impressed and more than a little jealous about) - his current favourite idea was that Even was an immortal alien who'd landed in a meteor fifteen years ago, which was only marginally more stupid than the one about him being a changeling faerie.

L'Erena quite liked to imagine that Even was a zombie and it was only a matter of time before he decided to snack on Lumaira's brain in the middle of the night. It made just as much sense as anything else.

She'd become half a housewife for Lumaira, so it was nothing new to be spending the afternoon hoovering the stairs or tidying up the sitting room in Naminé's practical absence - and clearly, Even had resigned himself to the same fate. He seemed faintly surprised at all this bustling activity about the house at all hours of the day, quiet as it was with Lumaira's mother sleeping upstairs. L'Erena found it amusing how much he floundered in this new environment.

As Lumaira made a salad for lunch with strips of chicken and tons of vinaigrette, Even tentatively shuffled over to L'Erena, who was wiping down the bookshelf in the front room.

"H-Hey. L'Erena."

"You can call me Rennie, you know."

"Oh. Okay, well. Um. Rennie."

Even wasn't terribly good at nicknames, the poor thing. L'Erena was pleasantly surprised to find that he wasn't as insufferable as she'd always just assumed; in fact, the most annoying thing about him was his sheer lack of confidence. Even Lumaira had more of a spine than he did.

"Yeah?"

"Do you always do this? I mean, you and Lumaira, are you always this busy?"

L'Erena laughed, chucking her cloth somewhere and flopping onto the sofa.

"Sure. We help my Dad out a lot at the garage, too. Why?"

"It's just a lot different to what I used to do," Even admitted, about which he seemed to be embarrassed.

"Why, what did you spend your time doing?"

"Um. Mostly computer games."

"What, all the time?"

"Yeah. There wasn't really much else to do."

"Didn't you help your Mum out with the housework?"

Even shrugged uncomfortably.

"We had a cleaner."

"Oh." L'Erena said, resisting the urge to add some people have it all. Even sighed to himself, and came over to sit at the other end of the sofa.

"Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I'd actually had friends."

"You must have had some friends," L'Erena said without thinking. Even curled up into a ball, tucking his knees to his chin and his chin to his chest.

"Nobody ever liked me."

Looking at Even squint miserably at his feet, long hair lying limply around his face, L'Erena suddenly understood Lumaira's desperate, painful dedication to the boy. He was right, nobody deserved to be so lonely, to think so little of themselves. L'Erena had had her moments when things at home were tense, but she'd always had to be strong for Lumaira and his mother, for her dysfunctional parents and her alcoholic uncle, for all her friends at school and at the park, and most of all for herself. And now, it looked like she was going to be defending a new member of her family - Even. She smiled to herself at the thought as she leaned over to gently pat Even's shoulder.

"Lumaira likes you," She said. "Lumaira really cares about you. You've made a big impression on him. And I like you, too. We're friends now, right?"

Even looked up, surprised.

"I thought you hated me."

L'Erena shrugged.

"Yeah, well, I guess we were both wrong."

She pulled away from Even, who apparently needed some time to digest this bombshell, and levered herself out of the sofa, grinning.

"Come on, let's go harass Lumaira."

"But-"

"Trust me. He adores the attention."

Things were just carrying on like always, Lumaira thought as he curled up in the unoccupied half of Naminé's bed on Thursday. Somebody had decided that those photographs of the car were photoshopped or the driver was hallucinating or something, and Naminé came home one morning to sleepily whisper that she checked for Even Carlisle on the hospital database at work and it didn't even so much as mention a visit the night he supposedly died. It must have been some kind of human nature, to ignore anything they couldn't explain. Even Even himself was just continuing his new life like he'd always been a somewhat timid part of the household. Whatever Rennie thought, she wasn't vocalising it, and Lumaira wasn't even sure how his own mind was coping with what had happened. But time hadn't stopped just for the resurrection of a dead boy, so the world was just continuing as it always had, oblivious or tided away by the stream of bustling activity.

But things were getting better; that was certainly true. Each day, Even looked a little healthier, and when Lumaira finally convinced him to climb onto the bathroom scales, it was obvious that he was slowly gaining weight.
With things coming together, Lumaira eventually decided that more needed to happen. Like getting Even a decent pair of glasses. The ones from the hospital were wearable, but Even clearly abhorred them and Lumaira was sure that it was hardly good for him to be walking around half-blind everywhere. So he'd called up the opticians that evening to arrange an eye test for Even on Monday. He thought that it would be wonderful for Even's eyesight to improve so he wouldn't have to wear glasses at all - but that was clearly impossible, no matter how much he wished for it. Then again, Even had risen from the dead... and if that was possible, why not correcting his eyesight? And maybe Lumaira passing all of his exams wasn't too much to ask for, either?

L'Erena called in sick to school on Friday, so Lumaira dragged Even around to her house with some chocolate and a get well card and they spent the evening there, playing video games in her room while she stayed safely tucked up in bed. L'Erena, Lumaira knew, hated being ill - so she'd never allow herself to be bedridden unless it was serious. But she laughed just like always, even if her voice was a little hoarse, so Lumaira allowed himself not to worry too much. It was just a throat infection, the doctor said after a quick inspection as he handed her a prescription leaflet and took his leave. And even Lumaira eventually had to admit that the blissful joy of mucking around with his old and new best friends couldn't last forever, and reluctantly carried a sleepy Even home. He couldn't articulate how glad he was that L'Erena hadn't stubbornly decided to hate Even; it had vastly improved the older boy's condition to have not only Lumaira declaring him friend, but L'Erena too. He was getting better, looking healthier, smiling a little more.

So there the two boys were on Monday after school, hanging around in the optician's shop and inspecting glasses as they waited for Even's appointment. The shop was empty, the glass windows blanketing the hustle and bustle of the street outside. Lumaira had plucked out all the nicest sets of glasses and pushed them onto Even's face - his favourites were a sleek rectangular pair with thin frames that sat nicely on Even's nose, but they were close to seventy pounds. Lumaira could never afford that, so he was forced to resign them back to the shelf and look at the ones he would actually have a chance of raising enough money to buy. He wasn't looking to make a purchase today - just getting Even's eyes checked out so at least they knew what to look for.
He was just inspecting the aisle of sunglasses as a small commotion sounded behind him, the lines of which were both familiar and chilling.

"Even Carlisle? That- that must be a mistake. He was the boy who... you know... remember?"

Lumaira gulped as the optician, a lovely young lady with flowing brunette hair tied into a bow, turned the corner from the private rooms of the shop and paled to deathly white.

"E-Even."

Even, who'd been closely examining one pair of glasses the way he always did, looked - squinted - up.

"Hullo, Miss Gainsborough."

"You, erm," The optician began, floundering a little for words as a nervous smile just about reached her lips. "You got better, I see."

"Yes," Even replied curtly with a glance at Lumaira. The optician laughed a little, shoulders sagging into a more relaxed position and she mothered him into the little booth with all kinds of equipment Lumaira, with twenty-twenty vision, had never seen before. He slunk into the back and waited against one corner, giving Even a reassuring smile.

"You're one of Even's friends?"

For once, Lumaira truthfully grinned as he shook the opticians hand, because when he nodded it was true. Even had friends. Granted, only two, but friends nonetheless.

"Yeah. I'm Lulu."

"Lulu," The optician chuckled, clearly amused by Lumaira's effeminate nickname. She bobbed her head and turned to Even. Lumaira let his eyes wander as he switched off from the routine checks and murmurs of surprise, letting his fingers lace and unlace idly behind his back. A clap of hands brought him back as the optician stood back and filed away the last of her clicking instruments, smiling.

"There's a definite improvement," She said, sounding impressed. "I daresay you'll be able to get away with wearing standard glasses now - but I wouldn't recommend it."

Even looked genuinely surprised as Lumaira and he returned to the shop and filled out some fairly useless paperwork. The optician gave him a few pairs of glasses for him to try out but the ones that were best for his eyes were all too expensive.

"What's the standard thing?" Lumaira asked as they meaninglessly browsed, a few more people wandering in and out of the shop as they pootled along the shelves.

"Magnification," Even autonomously corrected. "It's the ones you can buy in normal shops."

"And you could - potentially - wear them?"

Even nodded, frowning again.

"I'm sure my eyes are nowhere near that good, though."

They wandered out.