Maybe People Come Like Sodas in Packs of Six, or Six Billion.
A/N: Aaaand welcome to chapter-the-last of Rain Shadow. Yeah that only took me the length of three normal novels. But this is it. Sorry it took so long, but it's up now, so what's it matter what my excuse is?
(beeteedubs, my excuse can be described as 'OhmyGod this is the last chapter it's got to like sum everything up oh my FFFFFheavens what if it doesn't do that holy shit you guys. Aw, crap. Oh well, there's better stuff out there anyways. -pets it-' I get sentimental.)
Oh, and there's an epilogue. ...two epilogues.
OH WAIT. Yes. Haha. Are you aware of my friend muumuu122 from Winland. http: // img15 . imageshack . us / img15 / 5476 / rikujasora . jpg
She drew this prettypretty picture and now I think owns part of my soul? Is that how it works? I am pretty sure...that that is how it works. If that link doesn't work, I'm about to go put one on my profile.
Anyways, now I feel like one of those jerks who sits around in their author's notes gloating over reader stats, or number of alerts or reviews or something, and those people really bother me because hey dude way to make me feel like a faceless part of the unwashed masses, I can tell my reading of your story is really appreciated. Pfft. IGNORE ME, I am sick with a cold. -coughcoughhackhack- oh look my lung.
Anyways. HAPPY READING.
"We have the feeling of being confined - shut in; it is something like outgrowing a small town in a small country. The blue noonday sky, cloudless, has lost its old look of immensity. The word out that the sky is not limitless; it is finite. It is, in truth, only a kind of local roof, a membrane under which we live, luminous but confusingly refractile when suffused with sunlight; we can sense its concave surface a few miles above our heads. The color photographs of the earth are more amazing than anything outside: we live inside a blue chamber, a bubble of air blown by ourselves. The other sky beyond, absolutely black and appalling, is wide-open country, irresistible for exploration.
Here we go, then."
- Lewis Thomas, 'The Lives of a Cell'
When he was a little kid – really little, like seven, or eight – the house hadn't been big enough for each of them to have their own room. Him and his brothers, that was. So he'd had to share the room that led onto the roof. It didn't lead onto all of the roof, just part of it, and it'd been turned into a study when they'd gotten a wing added on, but Riku remembered his father shooing them out into the hallway when he had to climb up there to clean out the gutters.
Riku remembered not understanding why his dad had needed them to leave the room, until his mother explained that it was dangerous up there. Seven-year-old Riku fancied that this was how the wives of sailors must have felt, standing bravely on the shore waiting for their men to return safely with worried looks on their faces.
But he hadn't really put that much thought into it. Or at all, really. It was just a thing that happened in fall, and then he had his room back again.
So he didn't know why he ended up climbing up there. He just did it on a whim.
He switched the lights on in the room and closed the door; he pushed up the lower pane of the window with a slick wooden noise. He crawled through like an awkward panther ("grr, I'm a bulldog"), head and arms first then swerving his back under and pulling his butt and legs out last. He crouched and stood up.
Riku's roof was almost horrifically average. It was a peak, a flat part, and the less severely slanted part over the new wing. It had black and grey tiles, covered in tiny gravel. It was like walking on sandpaper and sheets of tar.
He was glad it was nighttime; the roof must be baking hot in the day. It was pleasantly cool now.
He could see the ocean from where he stood, sparkling like it just wanted to show you it could, and another island far away.
But the noises were people-based. Trees that people had planted, cars that people were driving, televisions that people were watching, dogs that people were walking. It surprised him how close to the ground he felt. If he stood at the very edge of the less-slanted part of the roof (not that he would) he was only ten feet above the sidewalk.
But oh, what ten feet they were.
(Exactly ten feet?)
They separated Riku from all of the nasty things in the whole world. They separated him from the people. Any armies coming for him would have to enter one-by-one through the yellow-lit room of the study, just an open square of window from where he was.
(Yes. Exactly ten feet.)
Riku Tepes began to pace tiredly. He never went less than two feet away from the nearest edge, which reduced his territory to a pitifully small rectangle of slightly slanted tiles. He stepped from them to the flat part of the roof.
It was just in front of the big peak Riku couldn't climb, and it held one of the chimneys (Who wants a fire on an island? thought Riku). Instead of tile, here there was a flat expanse of black rubber. Riku supposed, for a flat roof, tile made no sense.
Sora's roof was white stucco. It had rims all around the edges, a few inches tall – in case you rolled off, Riku supposed. Like the roof was made for people. For lying down and trying to find shapes in the cloudless sky until an airplane flies above you.
And since it was white, it didn't get that-that hot, just mostly hot.
Riku's roof was built in the 1970s, and it was meant for keeping the rain from leaking down into the house. That was all. The roof was not meant for standing on and watching people walk their people-dogs and watching their pitiful little people-trees and feeling disgusted with yourself because you were a people, and it was yours, too.
Sometimes when Riku watched movies, he couldn't help but despise the people who wrote them. He could sit there and predict every single line, and tell you who died by the end of the movie, because sometimes they were so cheesy and bad and stupid and, quite literally, does-not-happen, and he couldn't believe that adults thought that movie-watchers were so undeniably thoughtless. He couldn't help feeling like he could have done better, and he wouldn't touch creativity with a ten-meter pole.
And he wondered – especially lately – were people really like that? Maybe he was the odd one out. Maybe he was right, when he hated everything. People and their stupid trees and their stupid dogs and their stupid fly swatters. Their little dead-bug stains on walls. God, he just…hated – just…did.
The rubber of the flat part of the roof felt cool, just the tiniest bit squishy. He felt a little bit scared, because it didn't feel as solid as the tiles, somehow. Like he could fall through and into the living room at any moment. It wasn't as if anyone knew he was up there, even.
He wondered about that. It seemed like standing on the roof of a house in the suburbs – standing, not sitting and star-gazing or whatever – was pretty weird, wasn't it? People would think that was weird.
But not a single person – he knew, he knew the same way he knew what people were going to say in movies before they said it – was going to look up and notice a kid with snow-white hair and a stare that could cut right through a person, with jeans now washed of the stains from wet snow in Annecy on Christmas Eve. And he – God above, of all the things – he found it funny. He found it unspeakably hilarious that everyone in the entire world, including him, was willing to watch movies about people with magical powers or super abilities, but thought it was out of the question that there might be something on a roof besides tiles.
He took a sense of perverted, warped superiority that Sora could walk by right now and not even see him, or know he was there.
He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet; when he stood on his tiptoes, his jeans were so long that they touched the ground. He made little foot-tents of denim.
"I wonder," he said out loud to the sunset, "How loud can I talk before people will notice I'm up here?"
It wasn't that he was talking to himself, even. Or at least, not any more than he usually did – after all, he heard himself talking, and understood what he was saying, but he did that in normal conversations.
(So it's you against the world, Riku Tepes? Who do you actually think's gonna win?)
He laughed again, quietly and for only a few seconds, staring at the additional rubber of the additional wing. It had a few dry white-ish spots from the sea spray.
"Can I shout?" he asked the world. Then he shouted: "How loud do I have to be before you turn around!" It wasn't an angry shout, not even a little bit. Riku Tepes was just a confused, lonely person, and he thought it was funny, standing up there. "Can I yodel!"
He grinned and stuck his hands in his pockets, then started pacing around the rectangle of extra roof. He trotted like a dog in a crate.
"This is my cage," he told the world. "And this is me pacing my cage." He stopped in front of the chimney, which seemed odd in all that expanse of rubber hidden behind the very normal peak of a tiled roof of a forty-year-old house on Destiny Island. It was bricks and mortar; that was all. Seemed…oddly old-fashioned.
He leaned against one side of the chimney, which was three feet taller than Riku-standing-on-a-roof, but otherwise felt just like a very narrow wall. Riku thought about mortar dust getting stuck in his hair.
"This," he said, banging his head very softly against the chimney, "Is me marking my territory!" He laughed again because he sounded ridiculous, and nobody could hear him.
He idly wondered if this was crazy. Talking when there was nobody around. Everybody seemed to think that talking to yourself was something only deranged, crazy weirdoes did, or social outcasts, awkward lonely people and the elderly. He didn't understand why, though. What was so wrong with it? He was just speaking his thoughts out loud. He wasn't arguing with inanimate objects. He was just thinking.
And what did it matter, since nobody could hear him anyways?
"This is me roaring," he whispered. "I'm not very loud, because I don't want to scare anyone." Riku didn't expect the world to care, and was relieved when he heard a couple of girls walk by on the sidewalk on the other side of the roof, chatting.
He sighed and slid down the chimney (his shirt rode up on his back) and sat down on the black rubber with his knees bent, his arms draped over them. From this side, the peak of the roof was to his left, and the less-steep part was behind him. And he could see the sunset, sort of. A tree blocked the actual sun part, but he could see the pink clouds and the orange sky and all that shit.
Sunsets were the thing that movies couldn't exaggerate, but Riku still didn't see the big deal. They were pretty, and all, but so what? What did you do with a sunset? It didn't change your life, and it happened all the time. The sun was always setting somewhere. People just liked pretty things, he supposed.
He supposed there was…nothing wrong with that, really. As long as he wasn't expected to fawn over how romantic they were.
He rolled his head to the side and stared at the four feet of black rubber before the sheer dropoff that was the side of the house. His eyes drifted blankly over the lawn, which was mostly crabgrass now, and the cheap wooden swing set with yellow swings.
"This is my cage," he said again, quietly, with his hands on either side of his slumped body. He picked at a sliver of mortar coming loose on the chimney. "But they're opening the doors in a couple of days."
The mortar actually came out in a frighteningly palm-length hardened piece of concrete, nearly an inch thick, and heavy in his fingers. Riku dropped it guiltily next to him and stared at the tiled, peaked part of the roof as if he expected his mother to be standing there with her arms crossed.
You could do anything you wanted if you were high up enough, because nobody ever looked.
Two days until high school graduation seemed like not-enough-days. He wasn't even really affected by it. He had one summer to pack up all his things and move into the dorms, and then there he would be. He'd never really felt very attached to this island, even – it was not home, it was "where Riku lived". He supposed, when people asked him where he was from as people inevitably did, he couldn't say "the flat part of the roof on the dry side of the island". He'd have to say "Destiny Islands," even if it didn't feel very true. Riku carried his world with him. It was just that it was so small it fit on his shoulders.
But he kept coming back to the topic, in his mind. Like if he thought about it enough it would just resolve itself, or something. Hell if he knew.
He looked back to the piece of loose mortar, shifted forward so he could twist around and look at the chimney. Probably, all of the mortar was loose mortar. It wasn't a wonder it held up, though. There was hardly any wind, and it wasn't as it anything came up here.
It was like a desert made of tiles. There was some dead leaf litter, orange pine needles blown into a tiny triangular pile against one corner of the roof, and a whirligig or two. But that was all.
He picked up the piece he'd pulled out and started scratching at the rubber. Dust from the mortar rubbed off and made little scratchy lines.
Arctic, he wrote, on the rubber with the mortar dust. He couldn't write particularly well with just the people-rock and the people-roof, and the letters were uneven and got bigger towards the end. The C's were so big they looked capitalized, so really, he wrote ArCtiC, which made it look sort of falsely artsy.
"My whole life fits into ten boxes and a very full backpack," Riku told the word dully. He rubbed the mortar against the side of the chimney until chunks started breaking off. "And nothing is even going to change at college."
Twenty feet away, a squirrel ran across a telephone wire and leapt into a tree.
He decided, that night, that he might be able to wake up easier the next morning if he left the shades of one of the windows open. So that the light would wake him up, instead of his lazy teenage-boy body.
But it just made it harder to fall asleep, really.
Riku couldn't remember having much trouble getting to sleep in freshman year, or even sophomore, or the first half of junior. And he wasn't stupid, he knew why. Or at least he knew mostly why. Probably why, at least.
Because when it's just you in your world, you don't have anything to worry about. You don't care about dating, friendship, drama, teachers, brothers, you didn't care about moths and late-night Tuesday hospital visits and getting chips from the vending machine at the exact wrong time. You didn't care about having to hold a one-year-ago-maybe-gay boy with a hand covered in bandages who was trying not to sob for about the millionth time that day.
Maybe that was it.
Maybe it was the sickly orange light of the street lamps, turning Riku's blue room redyellow and reflecting dully off of his fingernails. It hit the face of his watch and made a little oval of light on the ceiling above it. Riku tried moving it around a little, and pretended it was a fairy.
"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
"It doesn't even seem, like…possible. You know what I mean? Like I know school's over tomorrow, but it still hasn't sunk in, sort of." Kairi sighed and tugged on Riku's arm. "Hey. No zoning out." She snapped her fingers in front of his face.
Kairi and Riku were hanging out, just them, no Sora.
Riku was tired. Fitful sleep did that to you.
He'd never really thought of the school as a place to hang out any longer than you humanly could. He felt…unwelcome, in the barest sense of "you're a teenager, and we only tolerate you during school hours." It had never occurred to him to get ice cream from the truck that parked next to the school just as it let out and then not get on his bus. It had never occurred to him to take his oreo milkshake and walk with Kairi to the fields and lean up against a soccer goal and stare at the dead patches of grass.
He didn't want to do anything special to celebrate the end of the school year. He didn't really feel like he'd earned it. He was not sentimental; the most he could muster about the entire situation was "Man, I guess me and Sora won't see Kairi as much anymore."
But he kept thinking about it.
"Riku!" Kairi made to kick him in the knee, swinging her foot back and pretending to aim carefully with one eye squeezed shut before kicking forward.
"Agh! I'm not zoning out! Jeez, woman!" He flinched and drew his legs in, leaning against the post of the goal and clutching his milkshake. The soccer goal was smaller than he remembered it being when he was a soccer-playing eight-year-old. It was completely rational in his mind, of course; childhood smallness combined with exaggeration would have magnified it in his memories. But he couldn't help feeling…disappointed.
Mayflies hovered like clouds in the air.
"You so were. You had that same look on your face that you did for the first half of junior year."
He frowned. "What, the 'everything-is-dead-to-me' look?" he joked, but she just rolled her eyes.
Grass was deceiving. It looked like a thick green shag rug when you were standing; it looked comfortable and squishy for sitting on, and as reliable as the chair in a hospital that you use to accidentally-kill a moth. But when he'd sat down, it had proved patchy, uncomfortably damp with fog, and almost as much dirt as plant. He couldn't shake the feeling that his butt was streaked with mud right then.
Right next to him, between the actual posts of the goal, the grass was almost entirely dead and pale tan. Like hay. And the goal itself was full of holes; the netting was stained brown. He looped his fingers through it and let them weigh the squares of rope down, turning them into soft, uneven arrow shapes.
"I guess it is weird," he said quietly, after a long pause. "I mean…" he let out a breath. "Because before, it's never been like this. I mean, even when middle school ended, we just had to go an extra block to get to the high school." He started idly tapping his foot against the ground, but he didn't have any pattern in mind.
"Yeah…" Kairi came and sat down, cross-legged, next to him. She wrapped her hands around her ankles and looked straight up at the rim of the goal post, and the sky. "Where are you going, again? I mean, place, not school."
"Washington," Riku said plainly. He'd learned to expect mixed reactions for his school of choice. People who weren't going to college didn't really care, and beyond that, if you were talking to another kid your age they'd compare their college to yours (even if they didn't say it out loud). And if you were talking to an adult who'd graduated, they'd start telling you all about their college. Or asking stupid questions. 'Oh, what are you majoring in?' As if he knew.
But Kairi just clicked her tongue (her throat made a gulping motion) and said, "…America, huh?"
"Yeah," he nodded. "America."
"Any reason, really?"
He shrugged. "I guess…well, they speak English, and it's…closer than England. So, I dunno. It just seemed like the obvious choice." He hadn't really thought of it as a 'choice,' even; it had just seemed a given. Riku Tepes, you are going to go to this school, now, let's get your passport updated. Oh, that's right, honey, you took that France trip…okay, let's file the paperwork for a student visa.
It had just sort of happened.
There were a few clouds, in the mountains to the west. Riku couldn't tell for sure, really, but it would probably rain soon. Not for a few days, but soon. He wondered if he ought to do something special when it did. Last rain as a resident on the island. But he couldn't think of anything to do.
The milkshake in his hand was cold, and water was condensed around the outside of the cup. When he put it down on the ground, it came up sprinkled with grass clippings and dead leaves on the bottom. Just a few, though, sticking to the water.
"That makes sense," Kairi said. "Hey…do birds sing when it rains?"
Riku blinked hard and turned to look at her. "Do…what?"
She shrugged and shivered, because she was wearing a short skirt and a tanktop. "I've always noticed that…I mean, that even on the wet half, like, when it rains, you don't hear anything but the rain. But is that because the rain's really loud or like, because everything stops singing?"
He raised an eyebrow and stared at her. 'Can birds still sing when it rains?' Goddamit, he was contagious, wasn't he? The thought made Riku laugh. "You sound like Sora," he told her. She was still staring up at the sky, but when he said that she frowned and looked at him.
"Naw," she said, making a face. "I do not."
"You do," he countered. "He's always saying weird like…weird…" he laughed. "You know, poetic-y things and stuff."
"He is?"
It occurred to him (and, really, not without some amount of smugness) that maybe Sora wasn't like that with everyone. Maybe only Riku, because he thought Riku would listen, or…or because he knew Riku would know that Sora didn't want to kill himself, just because he talked about it. "Sometimes," Riku amended. "Maybe I'm reading too much into it."
"Yeah," Kairi agreed with him, which he hadn't really wanted her to do. It seemed odd, saying something and expecting someone to contradict you, but he had and he did.
"What do you mean?" Her question seemed innocent enough, sitting on the trick grassdirt with her hands around her ankles. She shifted awkwardly until she was sitting with her knees together and her feet to the side.
Riku wondered what the point of wearing such a short skirt was, if it was so inconvenient for her. He could understand wearing shorts, but skirts just seemed like an extra hassle. Maybe his opinion was skewed. For one thing, he'd never worn a skirt, short or long, and he didn't really ever intend to try. Maybe it was about looking pretty – or no, not pretty, sexy. Right? If that was the case, no wonder he'd never appreciated girls in short skirts.
But maybe it was like popular music, or backsides, or Crocs. Maybe everybody was stupid, or maybe he just didn't get it because something was wrong with him.
It'd been a good thirty seconds since she'd asked him, and he wondered if that was too much time to answer. But it was Kairi; she was probably used to him.
"I dunno," he said. "I mean I can't really describe it, but sometimes he says stuff like that, about birds singing in the rain or something. Like…" he tried to think of an example that he could tell her, but he couldn't think of a good one. It just seemed to obvious, there. You didn't explain Sora. He just was. "I can't think of anything right now," he confessed.
"Ugh, I hate that," Kairi sympathized with him. "When you really get something, but you can't really explain it to someone else?" Riku nodded, even though that wasn't really what he meant. He figured, a forest would be boring, if all the trees were the same height. "It's like describing the color blue to a blind guy," she finished.
Yes, Riku thought, there would some kinds of blue you could only say were oughtta-sky.
But that worked, now that he considered it. If you told a blind man that Sora Goodwin had eyes the color the sky oughtta be, the color of tiny windows in a church on a street on a class trip in the snow, then he could pick any color his mind wanted and it would be right.
Kairi breathed out slowly through her nose, forgetting the question. In a remarkably Sora-to-Riku gesture, she slumped to the side and set an elbow on his shoulder.
He wondered what she was thinking about, but without much conviction. Kairi was a very talkative person, generally speaking – not that there was anything wrong with that, he schooled his mind. Just because they're not your thoughts doesn't make them worse, said a Sora in his mind. But anyways, Kairi being quiet just felt funny.
"So," he said, "Any progress with that guy?" There had been a few more sessions of Kairi complaining to them about Mr. Pretty-hair-perfect-ass and why she didn't want to like him. He knew it was awful, but he felt sort of like he was observing the life of a normal teenager from his post of antisocial fairy, hiding in his bubble. Curled up like an armadillo, or a butterfly stuck in a chrysalis.
God. Fuck butterflies. They were always a goddamn metaphor for everything, and Riku Tepes hated them. Nobody every smushed a butterfly against a sink.
Why did he always have to come back to that?
"Ugh…" she groaned like a sleepy cat, closed her eyes and thumped her forehead against his shoulder. "Don't even ask…" he'd figured out that this meant he should keep asking.
"Aw, well now I'm curious," he said, swinging an arm casually around her shoulders. She gave him a skeptical look and he grinned. "C'mon, tell fag number two what the problem is. Who'm I gonna tell?"
"Nothing to tell, really," she said, cheek against his shoulder. "We flirted at a party, about a week ago, but I left early, because people were starting to get…you know, drunk and stuff." She smiled. "You trained me well."
"Mm…" Riku made a noncommittal grunting noise.
"'S true what they say, I guess," she continued. "All the good ones are either married or…"
Riku chuckled. "Yeah," he said. "Maybe."
Kairi laughed. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe, maybe, maybe…"
They were quiet for a while, but not too long, really. It was the comfortably awkward silence of two people trying to think of what to say.
"Hey," she was the first to speak, naturally. "So, you would describe yourself as gay, right?"
"Well…yeah," he lied. "I guess."
When Sora finally showed up, the first thing he did after apologizing for having to help his foster mom out around the house was comment on the weather. Honest to God, like an old lady at bingo. Like two coworkers.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his baggy shorts; Sora was primary colors and confusing buckles today. He had on big shoes and fingerless gloves, though Riku didn't know why.
He shoved his hands in his pockets, stared at the sky and said, "Cloudy, huh?"
"Mm," said Kairi.
"Yup," said Riku.
Sora kept staring at the sky for a few seconds, blinking, with his mouth puckered. "I wonder if it'll still be cloudy when we graduate."
Kairi laughed and straightened out her shirt, twisting a piece of dyed red hair around her finger. Riku just waited, with hand slung through the net of the goal and the other hand around his melted milkshake, which he hadn't really wanted, anyways.
He watched his friend; watched the human cogs of his mind turn behind the solid opaqueness of his forehead.
"I hope it is," he said. "Cloudy, I mean. That would be…I dunno. Fitting."
"I hope it rains," Riku said, and when Kairi looked at him he smiled. She smiled back at him laughed silently.
"Yeah?" Sora sort of slowly made his way over to Riku, thoughtfully and randomly, twining their fingers together through the soccer netting. The braiding of the thin rope pressed into Riku's hand, and Sora's palms were hot through his gloves. "Why?"
"Dunno," Riku truthed. "It would just be…nice, I guess."
When they went to the mall (the mall was three clothing stores and a Radioshack), Kairi walked between them. She joked about three-way-dates.
"Gosh, me n' Riku, dating Kairi? But…but she's so pretty…d'you really think she'd like us?" Sora's eyes were big and wide, with one hand over his heart and the other over Kairi's shoulders, touching Riku's arm.
They walked together in a line, like a big, awkwardly calibrated machine with an inner-ear problem.
"Hey," Kairi said, "Right now, we are so those people I hate in school."
Riku wrinkled his nose and had difficulty understanding. Kairi was so…Kairi, wasn't she? Kairi had about a million friends. Kairi was on all the social networking sites with people vying for her attention, probably. "What, friends?"
She shook her head, "No, of course not! But we're like…line-walking. You know? So anyone who want to walk around us can't. I have so been late to class when I got stuck behind those."
"Oh, you should walk with Riku, then," Sora said, taking his arm off her shoulders to stick his thumb through his belt loop and pull his pants up a little more. "People can feel his death-glare in the back of their heads, and he just parts the adolescent sea." Kairi laughed.
There was an odd moment.
Well…a more odd moment, ten inches tall if it stood on its tippy-toes:
Kairi with her arm around Riku's shoulders, Sora with his hand in his pocket and a smile on his face. Riku had his arm over Kairi's shoulders, too. The sun wasn't setting, but it was low down enough in the sky that everything stretched sideways. The thin shadows of telephone wires fuzzed over the street in odd scallops. And they kept walking.
"Ah, hang on," she said, stopping and hopping on one foot. She kept one hand on Riku's shoulder and grabbing her ankle. "I think I have a rock in my shoe." She wasn't really wearing shoes. She was wearing…soft ballet slippers, if anything. They barely covered her toes, and they had little bows in the front. They looked sort of inconvenient, and probably uncomfortable.
"Ugh," she rolled her eyes and pulled it off her foot, heel first. She held it upside down and tapped the side a few times until a little piece of gravel fell out. "God, these shoes are so uncomfortable."
"Then why do you wear them?" Sora's eyebrows were drawn together, and he did a funny thing with his mouth.
"Because they…I dunno," Kairi shrugged. "They look nice." Sigh. "Screw this," her mutter was surprisingly dark, and she set her naked foot down on the ground and lifted the other one up, and she pulled her shoe off. Hooking one each on her fore and middle fingers, she slung her arm over her shoulder.
"You're gonna walk barefoot?" Sora didn't sound surprised so much as curious.
"Yeah. 'S just the sidewalk." She shrugged. "C'mon, guys, walk me home before you go on your little date or wherever!"
Kairi turned around and started walking backwards with her tongue stuck out. With her shoes slung over one shoulder and her feet bare.
Riku'd never gone down to the mall much; not ever, really. He hadn't needed to. But he was familiar with the place. The buildings were brick and dust, though their owners had made an effort at planting trees on the sidewalks.
Everywhere (had) looked the same.
It was dust, and dirty sidewalk, and hot, thick air. Everything like brown and like dry.
But maybe it was him, that made it look different. He noticed how it smelled vaguely of perfume from the beauty salon across the street, and how when Kairi walked backwards into the sunset, with her face to them, her whole head was outlined in pink and orange. How her face looked like a silhouette.
"Are you sure that's okay?" was what he said, though. "I mean, on the sidewalk…besides, people probably want you to be wearing shoes if you go into their stores." Sora looked at him funny, and Riku knew why.
"Yeah, sure," she waited for them to catch up, still facing away from the sunset. "Haven't you ever seen a girl carrying her heels after a party?" Riku got an image of a woman grasping her actual heels and sort of rolling across the grass before he realized she meant shoes. "It's not weird or anything. It's totally normal."
Sora blinked hard and looked at her very seriously. "It's not?"
"Not really Like, for girls? Nah."
"Oh, well," Sora said that like it solved everything, and sat his ass on the ground before pulling off his shoes. "Perfect!"
Riku kthought about it and laughed; he kicked his sandals off. "Yeah," he said. "'S only fair , Kairi."
--
"This is nice," Sora said. "I like this. I wanna walk down all my roads barefoot." Barefoot and curled up. His boyfriend took it at face value.
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
- Alan Watts
The beaches on Destiny Island had black sand. They had a little white, beach-colored sand, too, so when you were far away it looked grey. Like a volcano had erupted and everywhere was ash. Like solid smoke.
But if you came and sat down right in the solid smoke and the ash, you could see the black and the beach-color, and they were separate, and sparkled. They had something to prove they wore no shoes.
The black sand was heavier, and harder to wash away; past the tideline there were stripes of darker and lighter grey, depending on where the white sand got stuck.
They sat right on the tideline, him and Sora, and the dried seaweed went crunch under their butts when they did.
It was such a real beach, was the thing. It wasn't yellow with palm trees. It was grey.
"It's not gonna be…" Sora said. "It's not gonna be so bad. College. Even if we're not…"
"Yeah," Riku said, sore that it was being brought up. He had a sort of hot, heart-squeezy feeling in his stomache and his chest.
"I mean, I mean Kairi's gonna be pretty far, but I'm…we're only – I mean, you'll be two towns away. Or is it one? There's…my college is like on the outside of…and then after that, there's another town, and then you, right?"
"I guess so," he replied. "I guess that's only a couple of hours."
"Exactly! One if I speed." Sora was doing his it's-all-okay-if-we-talk-it-to-death thing. Riku kind of appreciated it, though. He didn't want Sora to sit next to him and ask him why he was alive if nothing was even important (Universally, Riku. Tu m'aimes, Ri-ku?). Or be asked about dying with no shoes on, and socks were funny, weren't they, because they only let you feel shapes, but you still feel the sock? He didn't want to pretend it would…all be the same.
"So, we won't have classes together, sure, but we'll see each other on the weekends. And holidays. Maybe even at night." Sora beamed like a kid in kindergarten. "We'll be…it'll be fine."
"I know," Riku said. He was almost insulted that Sora had to sit there and keep telling himself how fucking fine it was going to be. For one thing, Riku thought, what if it wasn't? They could say they'd meet up over the weekend, but maybe one of them would have a project when the other one was free, or it was raining, or they just didn't get around to it.
So there, Sora.
What if it's not all okay?
Sometimes, when he was in school, in a class, he felt like sticking his head into the sand like an ostrich. Or maybe just slipping his shoes off under his desk where nobody could see.
Of course it would be okay. Sora had to make everything okay, Riku knew. He had to make everything okay or he would go nuts.
"I know that, Sora," he said again, quietly. Sora nodded at him and leaned into his shoulder. So, Riku brought his arm up around Sora's shoulders. Not because of any obligation, really, just more because he could.
Last day, his ass. Like they'd never say stupid, half-baked, so-called philosophical things to each other anymore? As if the world was ever even that clear-cut about anything!
Riku knew. He knew, he knew, he knew. Nothing ever really left, not ever. Not even dead people, if they were leaving beautiful, horrible, wonderful, irritating, amazing, inexplicably there children around willy nilly like this.
God. He just…feelings were kind of annoying when you had them. They were kind of really annoying when he was all happy and peaceful and then not and then again.
"Every time I talk to one of the parents," Sora stuck his hand in the sand and dug it in, scrunching and unscrunching his fingers. His knuckles appeared and disappeared. "They end up saying something about like, our whole lives being ahead of us, or…" He made a brrr horse noise through his lips. "Everyone says…" Sora bit his lip and then un-bit it, staring at his toes. "Everyone says we're so young, you know? Prime of our lives and everything. But sometimes," and here he sighed, a sort of long, pitiful, well-thought-out Sora-sigh. "Sometimes I feel old. I just feel really…really, old."
Riku snorted. "That's because," he said sagely, "You've been alive all your life." And you haven't been alive a minute longer, so it's all you know.
"Ha!" Sora laughed out loud with his eyes squeezed shut. "God, we really are rubbing off on each other!" He held his stomach and laughed at himself, looked at Riku and smacked him playfully on the shoulder.
"You're weird," Riku said, taking his hand off Sora's shoulders and lacing his fingers behind his head. He lay down on the blackwhitegrey sand like that.
"Yeah, well," Sora shrugged and rolled on top of him, with his arms folded on Riku's chest. "You're a freak, Riku Tepes." He smiled. He kissed Riku on the nose, and Sora's lips were soft and warm, and he smelled like vegetables. Like picking pumpkins for Halloween. He kissed Riku on the lips.
"Hm," said Riku. "Yeah."
"Yeah," Sora said it just for something to say. "But you're my freak." Almost as a convenience, just because they lined up, they kissed again. "It's still weird," he said after a pause, quietly. "College, I mean. Feels like I…just got here. And now I have to leave?"
Yes, Sora, you do. Even though you feel really, really old.
(Sora talked about suicide and about getting disgustingly old. Old and I'll have skin like on my knuckles all over. I'll be creasy and gross. That's how old I'm gonna get.)
"What do you mean?"
Sora rolled off him and copied his pose, with his hands behind his head and his elbows sticking out to the sides. He lifted one hand and started ticking things off. "Well, I mean, I woke up in the hospital, and then Roxas left, and I got adopted, and we moved, and I started going to a new high school," he left his five fingers out and pulled up his other hand to continue the list. "And then there was you, and Kairi, and then a million other things about you, and now college…" he sighed and stuck his arms behind his head again. "I'm just waiting for everything to stop zipping around in the air." His voice was squeezy and tight, like his heart felt the same way Riku's did.
"I feel like I've been waiting for about a million years, Riku Tepes," real quiet he said that.
Without saying so much as 'yeah,' Riku rolled to the side and put his head on Sora's chest, tucked under his chin. He could hear his friend's heart. Thumpadabumpadabumpadabump. It was slow and steady like pulling a stream of water over a bunch of smooth rocks. Or like rain.
He watched the ocean lapping at the sand, with quiet slup, woosh sounds, still receding. Watched them from Sora's chest, and he could see a little thin hill where Sora's ribs stopped and his abdomen started, described by the washed out red of his shirt.
He heard the breath Sora took just before he spoke. Felt the words on the tip of his tongue. "You know how we were supposed to write really short notes and then but them in those stupid wish bottle things?" he asked Riku. And they'd had to do that, every person in their grade, a little phrase or word of advice or memory on a slip of paper, sealed in a tiny little bottle and then, they were told, getting released into the sea. Which Riku thought was ridiculous, pointlessly sentimental, and frankly bad for the environment. But they'd done it anyways.
"Yeah, I know," he said.
"What did you write?"
Riku shrugged lying down. "I forgot."
"Oh," Sora said. "Oh."
And, because it was expected of him, Riku asked, "What did you write?"
Sora sighed, and Riku felt it on his head and had a funny moment where he remembered freaking out about having Sora's head on his lap a really long time ago. Funny, only because he couldn't pinpoint the moment where it stopped being such a weird thing to do.
"It took me a really long time," Sora said. "And all I could come up with…I wrote that people need people." He punctuated each word by stabbing at the air with his finger. People-need-people.
After a pause, Riku sighed and laughed. "Sure," he said. "Real original."
Sora didn't seem at all put off by his skepticism. "Well," he said, lacing his fingers behind his head, "No teenager was ever famous for his ground-breaking philosophy."
Riku pursed his lips together briefly and licked his lips; he could just taste his lunch. Ham sandwiches left your mouth tasting like bread and hot metal. "I've never gotten that," Riku said quietly. "Ground-breaking whatever. I always figured you'd fall if you kept breaking the ground. I mean, when I was a little kid, I thought it actually meant breaking the ground. So I wondered what people stood on."
He raised himself off Sora and onto his elbows to watch the dead sunset. And Sora, he raised his hand up like he wanted to touch Riku, but he didn't.
So there they were.
Staring together from the same side of the line, two boys, not touching on a beach.
"You always…" Sora tucked his arms behind his head. "You always sound so unsure when you say things like that."
"Like what?"
"Like what you just said," Sora said, and his voice was punctuated with dry sarcasm. Uncharacteristic.
"I don't mean to," Riku fingered the hem of his shirt. He rolled the cloth against itself.
Sora closed his eyes, and he pretended, somewhere way far away hiding in the very back of his mind, standing on its tippy-toes and whispering, that he could hear the communal chatter of people on a rocky beach in northern France. The Ouais, je viens and Attends-moi! Only he didn't pretend Riku wasn't there, he just pretended Riku was quieter and closer.
"I know," Sora said, "I figure it's just…it's just how you are. It's just not how I am. I kind of…I kind of like that."
"Huh." Something on a rock way away cawed and made a splashing noise, and Riku watched the clouds coming from over the mountains in a painfully slow, soft, well-rounded rolling.
So, they were quiet again, for a while, and Riku wondered if that was okay. How could you tell if it was a comfortable silence, if you'd only ever had the uncomfortable kind? He wanted to know how far he had to come out of his Riku-turtle-shell to be able to taste the difference in the air when everyone was happy.
But Sora didn't look too worried. So, maybe Riku didn't have to be, either.
"I've changed my mind," Sora said after a while, and he licked his lips, drawing loop-de-loops in the sand with his finger. "About living, I mean."
The entirety of Riku's chest condensed, felt like a block of concrete dropped onto his liver. He imagined a hard little block of solid organs. "S-…Sora…?"
"No, no, not like that," Sora undid Riku's wound-up stomach with a wave of his hand. "I mean about…about why, I guess." Sora, rocking back on his butt, digging his fingers into the sand to keep himself steady, reminded Riku of something he didn't remember. Which was kinda funny.
"There's this guy," Sora said. "Alan Watts. He…he died when he was, w- before he even turned sixty. Heh," a funny little laugh. "Have you ever noticed how there are all these awesome people who died way too young, for no reason at all, really? But…he says," he took a short little breath. "He says that basically, there's no point to living. But that that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it. There's no point in having fun, either, but we love doing that. So he says, he says we should just make sure that everything we do is fun – not only do fun things, but to just…be…think, that everything you're doing is a game, because it's only work if – if you…think that you have to do it. So as long as…"
And here he laughed, like he was having a sudden realization laughed, with a bright and happy and chopped sound. "So as long as you know that life is pointless, I think, that you don't have to be doing it for any reason at all, it's just like…that is the point! It's fun because you aren't being forced into it."
Riku rolled his eyes and stopped listening halfway through. Sora was rationalizing something. Sora thought his thoughts out loud, because that was just how he processed everything. Riku was his quiet machine-forehead snow-haired green-eyed glare-that-cut-right-through-you thought-cooker and. And. Maybe that was okay.
He tuned in, though, just at the end. "No more 'life-is-revenge'?" he asked quietly.
"No," Sora leaned into his shoulder, two boys on a beach, touching. "That was stupid. Taking revenge on the whole universe would be like taking revenge on myself." Riku shrugged him off his shoulder, because Sora was heavy, and his breath tickled Riku's ear, and the clouds were coming in slow like on a conveyor belt.
"I'll just hover in the middle," Sora said. "I'll just be happy without anybody else having to acknowledge it." (1) He coughed a little, swatted at a fly and tugged his t shirt higher up on his shoulders. "And," he said. "I've decided that when we grow up," – when we grow up, like he was five years old and wanted to be an astronaut, or a cowboy, or a vet, or a kid with parents – "We're gonna be that old gay married couple down the street," with his hands laced behind his back and his eyes closed. "And we're never gonna mow our lawn."
"'Zat so?"
"Is so, Riku Tepes. And I think we should have like seven cats."
"Nah," Riku rolled onto his side to look at Sora. "I think we should have some dogs, and a really big fish tank, and one of those birds that only says swear words."
"How many dogs?"
"Six. That way we have eight things total. Eight's a lucky number."
"Really?"
They spent their last sunset as high schoolers talking about the kinds of pets crazy old gay men would have, and how instead of planting rows of flowers, they'd mix up a bunch of seeds they bought at the store and just throw them all over the front yard to see what sticks.
Which, when he thought about it, was a pretty damn good way to spend it.
"I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are."
- Frances Moore Lappe
Riku wore all black on the last day of school.
He didn't mean to. He just woke up and grabbed what came first, which was a black shirt, with long sleeves, and dark grey jeans. He didn't bother changing out of them, or anything. Wasn't as if it mattered if people thought he was being emo.
Does not happen.
He laughed because of how little it mattered, quietly, and inside of himself, because they were shuffled out of (the big mouth that swallowed people up and spat them out older) the doors of the building and onto the grass outside with ten minutes left of school. It occurred to Riku, as he stood with his class and looked for more suitable people to stand with (and really, there were only two) that he really ought to feel…a little more excited. Or scared, this close to the inevitable mark. But he wasn't. Not even a tiny little bit. He was kind of disappointed in himself, still so closed off he couldn't feel a thing.
It wasn't raining. First time in two years – that was all, two years – that clouds had crept up over the mountains and just kept going off to the other side of the archipelago. So you could look up and watch them, whitelight and wispy-flavored, with stiff peaks like soft-serve ice cream, being slowly dragged across the sky. It was calming, sort of.
The sky was blue and the grass was green, and the building was brown, and Riku Tepes was French fucking White. And he thought he saw Sora a couple of times before he really did see him.
"Hey!" He jumped a little before turning around, even though he knew it was Sora. It was like getting completely absorbed in a videogame and having someone knock on your door. "Whoa, Riku, you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, 'm fine." Digging his fingers into his hair, Riku squeezed his toes in his sneakers. "You just surprised me."
Sora hung his arm around Riku's shoulders. "'Kay," he said, and that was that. "So, Riku Tepes, you excited?"
Riku shrugged, and today was one of those days where the wind was exactly the temperature of your skin. "Not really," he said it like a confession. He shoved his hands in his pockets like he was mad at himself for beint so apathetic. "I mean, I guess, but I don't feel all that excited."
"Meh," Sora said clearly. "Just do your thing."
Ten…
They started shouting all together as soon as the principal announced it. Ten seconds left! Exactly ten seconds until you're an adult!
"Nine…"
Riku realized that he hadn't actually said 'ten,' or even 'nine,' and he felt like he'd already missed his chance. No point in starting at eight, really, but he did.
"Eight…"
Each number carried with it a sort of weight. The weight of thirteen years of public school with the exact same people, plus the one extra who actually managed to worm his way in.
"Seven…"
"Six…!"
The numbers ended now going up! Like a question going up! Floating with excitement!
"Five…!"
"Four…!"
And then they got so loud, you couldn't tell who was shouting or if anyone wasn't, and Sora was bouncing a little on the tips of his toes and Riku's detached mind, floating not with excitement but with a self-furious indifference, wondered if it was bittersweet for his boyfriend who wanted to be shouting in French, far, far away.
"Three…!"
"Two!"
"One!"
God, no, please no, I don't think I'm ready.
"ZERO!"
They were so loud, Jesus, they shouted so much it was like being surrounded by an angry punctuated wind that didn't leave, but Sora's skin was pink and his eyes were blue, and his hair was shiny and rough and caught in Riku's eyes in confused flashes because he pulled Riku's head down and kissed him right on the mouth.
franticallylovinglybravinglyhappilySoraly.
Kairi? Was there? Riku blinked and she was, anyways, laughing with them and yanking off her plastic sunglasses and tossing them into the air with the hats and the scarves. Everyone was shouting and laughing and Kairi pointed at them and put her shaking hand on Riku's shoulder, "God, Sora, I can't believe you just d- haha! Did that!" And laughed even harder.
"Dude! Dude! Sora!" Some big, disconnected part of Riku, calm like an undisturbed puddle on a farm road, found it a little annoying that this late in the game Sora still had about a million friends Riku'd never heard of. Like the one, coming, just that guy he saw in the hallways sometimes and thought that maybe he shouldn't wear that baseball sweatshirt so much, because wearing the same thing every day was pretty – pretty – it was like what Arthur the Aardvark did.
And then maybe you were never gonna have to see same-sweatshirt-Sam ever again for your whole life, or if you did, you wouldn't recognize him. Because high school was over forever and same-sweatshirt-Sam (what was his name?) was laughing with Sora. "Haha! Dude, what the fuck? Did you just kiss a guy? Ha! Jesus, Sora!"
Sora laughed with him, elbowing Riku in the stomach. Riku's conscious mind clicked back into place angrily: boys are not supposed to kiss other boys boys are not supposed to kiss other boys Sora just kissed you he kissed you in front of everybody in your whole fucking world after all the paranoia and the fright and the why would he do that when you could have gone your whole time here without being asked questions or looked at funny and now it's gone you're gonna be that kid who kissed a boy at graduation—
Sora laughed and fake-punched same-sweatshirt-someone in the shoulder, and he said, "Hell yeah I did! You jealous?"
Laughlaughlaugh. "Seriously, what the hell?" Laughlaugh. Laughter was like an unspoken hands in the air. Nonthreatening.
Casting his eyes to Riku, Sora shrugged, and he grinned wide. "I'unno, makes it easier to remember the day. Maybe you should kiss a tree."
Kiss a tree. Like Riku fucking Tepes was a ten-meter-tall tree. Goddamit, Sora, every time.
Kairi lost a flip-flop climbing over the rocks at the point-of-the-island beach. The one that Riku came to when it was raining, the one that was too many rocks to be pretty, right smack in the middle of the line that divided the dry bit from the wet bit. You could stand on that line, if you wanted.
It slipped between two big boulders, because she hadn't been paying enough attention. It bothered Riku that somewhere in all his ugly gray nature was a brink pink plastic flip-flop.
And damn if it wasn't sunny as all Hell, and the sky was not cloudy and dark and closed like being tucked in by a giant comforter, but it was open and big and scary.
"Hey! Guys, wait up!"
"Aw, Kairi! Just walk! You aren't even on the pointy rocks yet! Everything over there is flat and dry."
"'S not my fault you wanted to come here right after school," she hollered back at them, crouched and reaching towards the next big pink-grey boulder. "I'm still wearing a skirt!" Her hair looked an even lighter red in the sunlight, which washed angrily over the rocks like it'd been forced awake that morning. If you looked close enough, you could see where her hair turned darker at the roots. Where it was growing back normal.
Riku was sitting on his rock, which was now light grey, covered in tiny white salt crystals and barnacles which dug into his thighs like pebbles in a shoe. Because it wasn't raining, now, not anywhere on the whole island. A seagull made a long hollow seagull noise. The ocean made an ocean noise.
He swung his legs and kicked his feet against the boulder, stretched his head around like a stiff owl to see Sora a couple of leaps away and Kairi further, still trying to hop, with one flipflop in her hand and the other lost to the crabs and the tiny little bug things stuck in water bottles.
"Hey," Sora said when he was one rock away, and touching distance. With his hands in his short pockets and his big stupid yellow shoes scraped with mud.
"Hey," Riku said.
There wasn't anything to say, really, except for the being confused thing. The thing about kissing you in front of everybody and making Riku freak out about it and then making it into a joke. Even though he was supposed to be the brave one. It was okay for a few minutes at a time, and then he'd look at Sora, and think about it, and it would start to bother him just that tiny little bit.
There was a thing that fixed this last time, he knew it. What was it?
Communication, his mind replied sarcastically.
"Sora?" Kairi was still far enough away.
"Yeah?" When Sora smiled down at you the angry sun got stuck in his spiky hair, trapped in between all the brown. And his eyes were sort of…they were different. Only they were still really, really blue.
"Why'd you…when that guy asked, you acted like the whole kissing thing was a joke, didn't you?" he said it uncomfortable. Like it was a barnacle digging into your thigh.
"Yeah…" Sora looked a little upset, like he'd been scared of it happening. "I kind of figured…I mean, you were looking at me so weird, I figured you were angry I'd done that, so I thought you wanted me to act like it was just a joke." He pursed his lips and he rubbed the back of his head with his hand.
"Oh!" Knowing he sounded a little too excited, he edited himself. "Oh," he said again. "I thought…I dunno. Sorry. You don't…have to do that, you know."
"But you looked so –" (Oh, Sora the fucking hero, right? How could he have forgotten.)
"I know, sorry, I just…" Riku breathed out, hoo, to get rid of the tight hotness in his chest, and smiled. "I just need to start getting used to it, you know? It's a stupid thing to freak out about. So just…let me be freaked out at first. Okay?"
So Sora the wonderkid smiled again. And Riku liked to think he smiled the same way now as he did before his parents died. "Yeah," he said, "Okay. I'm glad you…know that it's a stupid thing to freak out about. I mean," and it was here that he paused, glanced up at Kairi and laughed because she was stuck between two very slippery, seaweed-covered rocks, and he jumped over onto Riku's rock to stand next to him and look at the exact same things. "I'm really very confused. I've noticed this sort of, this kind of paradox thing."
Leaning back on his hands, Riku asked standing-Sora, touching-distance, "What?"
"Everyone…okay, not everyone, but a lot of people say that…you go through life alone, right? Ultimately…you…choose how it goes. But, but they also say that no man is an island. So I guess…yeah. I'm confused."
Oh, oh! He was so glad he knew this one, he was so glad he had an answer for Sora's question, that this time it was a real question with a real answer but no question mark.
"So?" he said. He sounded kind of cold, and maybe a little meaner than he meant to, and maybe nine feet three inches tall. "That's what people say. People are telling you that. So you use that to think what you think. That's all. You use you, and you use them, and you get…more you, I guess."
Swing, swing, kick, kick. His heels bounced off of the rock and back into the air. Next to him, Sora shivered, and drew his hood up over his head even though it wasn't all that cold.
"…yeah." Sora rolled his leg to the side and bumped his knee into Riku's shoulder. He laughed, looked back at Kairi and said, "I love you."
It was kind of overwhelming, because you were right in between the wet half and the dry half of the island, but at the same time, you were with your boyfriend looking out in the same direction, from the same side of the line. Even if he liked to talk about dead fucking gurus or how many suicides were in your average school day.
Riku snorted. "Yeah," he said. "Me too."
"Sora! Jeez! A little help, here!?" Kairi yelped and half-slid down one of the rocks, which had Riku wondering what the Hell she'd done on this island when she was a little kid. What was there besides beaches? You rock-hopped when you were little. Hop-hop-hop. Like a penguin. Everyone knew that. He was just glad he was here and not on one of the sandy beaches. Here the crabs didn't run away when they saw him and the seagulls didn't expect any food.
"Come on, Kairi, it's your right of passage! Become a real woman!" Sora laughed like a hyena and looked back at her.
"Exactly! You gotta traverse the rocky time of puberty!" Riku added, leaning back on one hand to watch her.
"…you guys suck," she said eventually.
At the same time, "Yeah."
This world was colored in brown, blue, and green. There was just this tiny bit of white, and on the afternoons if you stood in the right spot, there was yellow. Theirs was cozy and it didn't move much, but there was a door made of trees and it didn't have a lock.
Sora laughed again. "Haha! I just noticed…lookit where we're sitting. We're right on the edge of the two parts of the island, right? Look, Riku!" He straddled his legs and put his fists on his hips. "I'm standing in two places at once!"
So, all Riku did was he laughed too, and yawned, and he kissed the inside of Sora's knee really fast. "You're always standing in two places at once, stupid," he said. "It just depends on where you draw the lines."
The end.
"The scale is very small, and it is not at all clear how it works, but it makes a nice thought for a time when we can't seem to get anything straight, or do anything right."
- Lewis Thomas
A/N: Fffff.
Ffffffffffffffffffff.
Okay. Kay then. Okay. Yeah okay that's how I wanted to end it. Okay. Okay.
HAHA
okay.
I think one of the main perks of the fanfic format is that everyone has a chance to interact with everyone else, plus one person said that people might get kind of intimidated by me? Which is ridiculous. Have you looked on my profile? I am certifiably paranoid and introverted. I will talk to you if you want.
So if you feel like talking to me, even though I have decidedly limited knowledge when it comes to social norms, standards or um basic etiquette, you can find me on here, MSN, Gaia, deviant art, fictionpress...which is a little sad, but, hey. My brain is...ran out of...stuff. Just ask me. PM. Review. Is it presumptuous to assume anyone will care? Pfft, whatever. SOCIAL ETIQUETTE HAHA I DON'T EVEN-
-coughcoughhackhack- OH LOOK MY OTHER LUNG.
Review?