But to Make Them Truly Ours, We Must Think Them Again Honestly.
A/N: You should worship me. Why? Because I took a math test this morning, I had an 8-hour rehearsal on Friday, a 6-hour rehearsal on Saturday followed by a concert, I have to write a speech on our failure to understand the full potential of meaningful literature, I have another concert on Wednesday followed by a science team meet Thursday, I have to do four quantum chemistry worksheets and two equally difficult problem sets, memorize forty French vocab terms about friendship, and know every single thing about the ocean by February, but I still wrote this freaking epilogue.
Dang. Well, if you have any questions, ask. I know this last part is more obvious than the others but I a little bit just wanted to drive it home. (Guess how many word this chapter has. Guess. OVER NI- look at what English class has done to me.)
Anyways.
"But it is illusion to think there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia."
- Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell
It was tall, and if you stood outside across the street and squinted one eye, you could see how it tilted to one side. It had three floors if you counted the top one, which was just two modified storage rooms with lead paint on the floors. The stairs were bare wood, blackened with age and bowed in the middle; the floors too, mostly.
It was coming apart at the seams. The first floor had a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, what passed for a dining room, and a closet at the base of the stairs. The second floor was three bedrooms, a bathroom and a home office (which was three half-empty bookshelves, a desk, and two laptops stacked on top of each other – because he insisted).
It smelled funny everywhere, and there were two fireplaces they were both too scared to use. It wasn't dusty, exactly. But it smelled like a forest without evergreen trees, humanized; you could tell all this wood had been outside. Sometimes you ran into something that was elaborately carved and stuck out like a sore thumb; the intricate pillar at the top of the stairs, the bedposts of the only remaining bedframe.
The fridge was old and inefficient, yellowing with age. The cabinets were mismatched. They bought a couch.
He had tried sliding down the banister of the stairs the first day and sprained his ankle. Stupid kid that he was.
Didn't seem like they were old enough to own a house. Their own house.
It was old and smelled like deadwood, and it was coming apart at the seams, and needed about a million repairs if it was going to last more than five years, and wasn't – anywhere, really, which was why it was so cheap. It was a three-minute walk from downtown where the big chain grocery store was and it was an hour-long commute, with walking and waiting and train time, from where either of them had to go every day.
It creaked when they walked up the stairs, or stumbled; the creaks creaked.
Riku sat at the kitchen table and tried very hard to wonder at the whole concept of the universe and all, but found he was really just very tired. He rested his head on his textbook; it was cool, and smooth, and paperplastic against his cheek. His hair splayed out around his head and hung over the side of the book. He surveyed the tiny cracks and ridges of wood in the table thoughtlessly, trying not to think about Prozac for dogs or whatever he had to read about next.
The inside of his sweatshirt was still warm and fuzzy, and fresh, and smelled like the store Sora had gotten it from.
He was a vet's assistant. He was going to vet school and everything but mostly, he liked being the assistant. He had to wear teal scrubs, which sucked, but he didn't have to talk to the people much (that was what the receptionist was for) or give anyone any bad news. He prepped things, and he liked the idea. Of having your job be preparation. Of having your job be petting the dog and making sure it stands still while the real veterinarian checked teeth and poked things.
He didn't like the part where they put pets to sleep, though. That always made him unhappy because he had to come in first, alone, and hook a threadbare leash to a metal pole and get the dog up onto the operating table, and get him or it to lie down. He had to sit there and pet it, and lie and say things like 'there, there, you'll be fine, it's okay' and he hated it when they weren't even old or sad. Sometimes they just couldn't anymore. Live, that is. Cancer or swallowed too many of the wrong thing or food poisoning and he didn't care if it was the "humane thing to do". It was the worst part of his job.
If he could muster the words he would tell the dogs the truth. "They're going to kill you," he'd say. "I know you were planning on doing it by yourself, but they don't want you to be alone when it happens." He'd dig his hands into the mane of fur around their necks if they were large enough and scrub their necks with his fingers. "It's okay, though. I knew this moth once that got crushed by a chair even though it was just trying to sleep. I think it's better this way, don't you?"
But usually, with a sick sad little turning in his stomach, he'd leave the room when the family came in.
It wasn't the death that scared him. It was the never-ever-never part. Of something going into that room and never coming back out of its own volition. Somehow it felt wrong to have that room be the place of so many final moments.
Final-final-final. If everything's always changing, how can nothing ever go away? If everything's always changing, why do people stay so dead?
"Ugh," he said with some finality, and banged his forehead on his textbook.
"You sound like you're having fun," Sora said, sarcastically cheerful or cheerfully sarcastic, Riku couldn't tell; he swung into the kitchen with his arm around the door frame and opened the fridge with a quiet shlick.
"Yes, well," he replied. "Some of us are still grad students."
"Mm-hm," Sora pulled out a soda and a yogurt, which Riku knew to be a pretty disgusting combination if you had them together, because the bubbles in your nose from the soda lemonlimed your vanilla yogurt. He didn't say anything. Sora thought pretzels dipped in soy sauce was good. "Oh! I think we got hired to do a car commercial today."
"How? I mean, that's just…filming."
"Naw, it's some environmental car thing, so they want like insta-blooming CG flowers and stuff like that."
"Oh," Riku sat up and tugged on his sweatshirt; he watched Sora move around the kitchen. Grab a spoon from the drawer and sit down, find the foil lip of the lid and peel it back. The glue around the edges of the yogurt container was too strong and he ripped it. "Aw…" pinching his thumb and forefinger around the remaining metal, which had yogurt on it already, he peeled it off and sucked the residue off of his fingers.
"Watcha readin'?"
"Vet stuff."
Whereas Sora worked for an animation company, doing ads, special effects, things like that, which didn't seem nearly as noble but sure didn't involve sticking a needle into a dog paralyzed with fear until it stopped breathing.
Riku, now, found it hard to breathe – not because of the euthanasia thing, of course; he'd long ago accepted that as inevitable. It was just some silly part of him that got sentimental sometimes – but the – thing was.
He hated people. Riku Tepes hated them, all of them, as a species or a group or a global phenomenon, whatever. They sucked was the conclusion he'd come to.
Mostly because they were everywhere and never acted how you wanted them to act – never, never smiled back when you were feeling brave and smiling first, never asked if you were alright even though you were moping around, always thought you were being nosy if you asked too many questions about their dogs while they waited for the 'real vet' to come into the room.
They were f- they were just everywhere. Ubiquitous, as his bombastic textbook would say.
When you got frustrated at something and wanted to scream, or got excited about something and wanted to scream, or got sad about something and wanted to scream, you couldn't because somebody might hear you. Somebody might hear and think you were getting mugged or beat up or raped and call the police, which would have been the sensible thing, of course.
Sometimes his heart buzzed. He had never screamed. Never.
He'd shouted, of course, but a part of him wanted to see how much louder he could get. Set his volume to max.
There was a difference between shouting and screaming so much your lungs hurt and your throat felt stripped. He imagined that was what it felt like, like after having a really good cry, tired out and trembling from quiet aftershocks.
He would not scream for fear of what the neighbors would say, and this part of him had been so unavoidably inscribed in his mind from the beginning of high school it was killing him now.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Riku Tepes wasn't calm but he was contained. He felt funny.
He looked at his hand, outstretched on the table, and flexed his fingers out and in. Sora's hand was inches away, reached out to his, drew back.
"Hey," Sora said quietly. "Are you okay?"
"Do you ever feel like screaming really really loud, just to see how loud you can get?" He didn't say his thoughts aloud very often – for fear of what people might think, but – he did sometimes.
"What, you mean like into a pillow?"
"No."
It wouldn't go away, this feeling, this quiet tightness in his chest that wasn't excitement or frustration or sadness or – anything, really, just energy. The part of him that bubbled up into his heart sometimes that he was sick of choking back down. It was an itch his couldn't scratch. He wanted to squeeze himself really tightly. Make the blood pump faster and hotter to dissipate it. It got worse the longer he stayed here.
Maybe it was the land. Not being able to see the ocean every time he looked out the window – he figured he'd gotten used to it. That he'd taken it for granted before, really.
"Then what do you mean?" he was almost angry with Sora for not getting it.
It dawned on him in an anticlimactic way. "Dunno," he said. "Like I want to go to the top of a mountain and just…scream really really loud. Or laugh really hard. Don't you ever feel like that?"
"Did something happen?"
"Does something need to happen for me to feel weird?" he asked morosely, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his stomach. Sora had toned down a lot after hitting twenty-four. He got along with everyone, and he made friends easily, and this was what: they underestimated him. But he didn't spew half-baked philosophical crap except for a very very few sometimes; what he did was ask interesting questions.
Riku's favorite thing was probably the late night discussions, in the bed or on the couch, or at the kitchen table because he'd get up for food in the middle of the night and Sora would follow him down like a neurotic puppy. They talked about everything, about the uselessness of almost all the math you learned after eighth grade, about books whose covers were too far apart, about the stickiness of scotch tape or the importance of putting your Skittles in rainbow order before eating them (red ones came last) or why it was that after a billion years of evolving to live on land whales went back to the ocean in the end.
You changed. Things changed you.
"No," Sora said. He grazed his thumb along the stretch of skin between Riku's forefinger and thumb. "Sometimes I want to scream too, but not in an angry way."
He hated Sora, sometimes, for getting him more than he got himself. It sounded romantic when he said it like that; it wasn't. He was almost sick of not being good enough and – being told he was good enough, having it enforced.
Sora picked up Riku's hand; Riku brought his other hand over and made a Sora-hand-sandwich; Sora did the same. He watched their hands, and looked up at the ceiling, which was white plaster.
"I heard this song on the radio," Sora said (he told the ceiling). "I don't remember who sang it, though. And then at one point they said 'as far as I'm concerned, there's only one way up.' Do you think that's true?"
"What?" It wasn't that he didn't understand; he was just stalling.
"That there's only one way up?"
Riku shook his head and tried to come up with a real reason for shaking his head. Besides it seems like the right answer. "There's that up," he pointed up. "But I could go to the other side of the world and up would be a different direction, wouldn't it?" He knew that was the stupid cliché answer but he said it anyways. "Or if I wasn't on Earth. If I was on the moon facing the Earth my up might be towards the Earth or to the sun or perpendicular to either of them, or if I was in space – I mean if I was in space I wouldn't have an up or a down. I could be upside-down and feel rightside-up."
Sora laughed at him (with him?) and squeezed his hands. He smiled really bright.
"What?" Riku was feeling defensive now.
"Nothing," Sora said. "Nothing. You're wonderful. I wasn't thinking of it that way at all."
"How were you thinking of it?" Sora's hands were cold at the tips; his palms were warm, and his fingers were blotchy from the winter air. He was such a real person.
Sora Goodwin shrugged and looked back down at their hands. "I thought it meant forwards," he said. "You know, like that guy says, how there are a million ways to be unhappy but only one to be happy for every person?"
"That's different, that's just entropy."
Laughing, and with his yogurt abandoned, Sora wrinkled his nose. "L'entropie?" he asked. "Just say chaos. Is that really the same thing?"
"Substitute happiness for…organization. It is. I was thinking about that."
"Pagaille," Sora said.
"What's that?" It didn't sound like chaos or entropy.
"Messy," Sora told him. "You want to scream? Like the people who yodel at the tops of mountains?"
Clunk. He put his chin on the table and looked up at Sora, for whom the term 'boyfriend' seemed derogatory. "I'm being weird," he muttered. "Ignore me."
He shook his head. "Me too," Riku wasn't sure if he meant the being weird or the screaming or both. "I used to feel it all the time. If it's the same thing you're talking about." When he bit his lower lip, his eyebrows creased – it always worked like this. "Sometimes it felt like I wanted something only I didn't know what. Especially in the hospital when I was all doped up on morphine. You remember? When you came to see me in the hospital?"
Riku nodded. He wondered if that's what this was, if it was wanting.
"I never knew what to call it, though, so I called it my alien emotion. I imagined a little green alien with big black eyes." He laughed. "It…would go away but…"
"It's like anticipating a sneeze and then not sneezing," Riku finished for him.
Staring absently at their round-cornered fridge, Sora smiled and looked at Riku. His bright blue eyes sparkled like they had something to prove like the ocean like somebody's mother like he didn't think about anything before he said it.
"I – " he started and stopped. "Come on." He tugged on Riku's hands until Riku stood up, and kept them together while Riku followed Sora through the door of the kitchen to the creaky narrow stairs.
"What?"
So, Riku Tepes followed Sora Goodwin up their stairs and down their hallway with the crappy carpet into their bedroom with the crappy wallpaper, where you could actually see a forest out the permanently-stuck window if you drew back the hideous flower-print yellow curtains. Their bed had a quilt, like an actual quilt with squares and everything, which smelled like the rest of the house.
Their house. Which they owned with their money from their jobs in the city they moved to.
Who followed who? He wondered sometimes. If he'd tried really hard to get a job so he could stay close to Sora who protected him from – something. Because it was probably unhealthy, being attached so strongly to just one person, but he did it anyways. He didn't trust himself to ever get this close to anybody else.
(Like having to cough but choking it down and just clearing your throat.)
(Or ignoring an itch until it went away.)
(He didn't want it to this time.)
(Screamer screamer screamer. It almost sounded poetic if you kept saying it over and over and over and over in your head and thinking about the noise.)
The next morning found Sora hiding his face in the crook of Riku's shoulder, shivering, probably, because Riku'd hogged all the blankets in the night. Sora's bare back was exposed to the barely-heated indoor winter air. Riku saw this as only fair, of course; he was still relatively unused to cold temperatures. Sora made fun of him for it, most days.
Wordlessly, Riku shuffled and tried to thrownudge the comforter back over Sora's shoulders.
"Gee, morning to you too," came his muffled voice from under the covers. It tickled Riku's skin.
"Oh. I didn't realize you were awake." He would have realized, of course, if he'd been paying attention. But that was the thing, wasn't it? It was so calm now. The tiny screaming voice in his chest was gone. Lying in their big, squished, sometimes-uncomfortable bed with the quilt and the comforter in the middle of a wooden room with two windows, one on each non-door wall, with your person next to you. Even if you had to get up and go be a vet's assistant and he had to get up and go make animated car commercials. It was enough.
It wasn't emotional roller coaster highs and lows and doing somersaults, waiting for the good days (though there were good days, and there were bad days). It was a quietness that seeped into you from all sides and said: this is enough. To worry about sealing up the windows or keeping the pipes from bursting, or what kind of present to send Kairi for her birthday, or where and when you really had to buy new boxer shorts. It suited him.
Sora poked his head out from under the covers and put it back on Riku's shoulder; Riku shivered because his feet were cold. He used to just tuck the blanket under them, he used to make a foot cocoon of blankets; this was one of the tiny crises he dealt with on a daily basis. Were Sora's feet cold? Would he be interrupting Sora's slow waking up if he tucked the blankets under their feet? He never quite resolved it in his mind.
"Hn," he said eventually, ignoring his feet and rubbing his hand up and down Sora's arm. "I feel like we're still not grown-ups." He said grown-ups, not adults.
"Why?"
"Even though we own a house. I don't know. Does that make sense?"
Sora shrugged sideways and shuffled upwards to look at Riku eye-to-eye. "Yes," he said simply. Kissed him. "Keep going."
"I…dunno. I don't feel like a grown-up," he continued.
"You're not. You're still in your early twenties. Technically speaking you should be waking up right now, with a hang-over since yesterday was Friday night and you should've been out drinking, and possibly you should be waking up in some foreign girl's or guy's apartment after having a one night stand with your poor, impaired judgment!"
"We live together," Riku countered. "We own a house. We have jobs and we pay bills and everything. All we're missing is two-point-four kids and a dog."
Sora had pressed his head further into his pillow, even though their pillows were older than they were and missing any amount of plush they'd originally had. You had to stack like two and a half on top of each other in order to get it the height of a normal pillow. Oops.
"Sora?" he asked.
"Do you think the people near us think it's weird we live together?" muttering into the pillow.
And Riku laughed and patted Sora on the head, because he had absolutely no idea how to comfort people at all when they were shirtless and in your bed and not really that upset in the first place. "The world's more accepting than you think," he said. Only it almost sounded like a question.
"But what if it's not?"
"Yeah? What if it's not, Sora? What then?"
Sora breathed out through his nose and played his fingers over Riku's ribs; the tips of his hands were still cold, and the backs of them dry in the winter air. He smiled. "I guess," he said. "Maybe it's just my turn to feel weird."
"Feelings are weird," Riku said, sitting up a little more.
"You're weird."
"That too."
Laughing and scooching up to lean over Riku's chest, Sora pointed. "Riku," he said. "Look outside."
He did.
The window frames were all painted a sort of sickly monkey-puke green, peeling since it had been the choice of its owners in the fifties, and always, always there was winter in the tiny shivery lines of frost which traced scratches in the windows. They were all hexagonally perfect, in his mind, even the ones that were uneven and lopsided.
Snow.
(Was a bad word for it, because it sounded like it was already on the ground being stepped on. It didn't tell you anything about how it felt when it was falling and how it was like watching the air move. How it floated.)
His favorite part about snow, he had learned since he moved off of Destiny Island, was right when it first started falling and there wasn't any on the ground. He couldn't have said why.
"It's snowing," he said quietly, just to hear the words out loud. "No wonder it's so cold up here."
There were times when Riku a little bit resented working on Saturdays, if only because he was still in the college mindset that Saturdays were for Sleeping (Mondays were for Moaning, Tuesdays were for Trudging – it was all on this disgustingly cute towel Sora got him as a joke gift).
The table the animals sat on was steel; shiny and metallic and cool to the touch. The fuzzy blurred reflections of the fluorescent light bulbs above it stretched bright white and eye-hurting across the surface.
He wiped it down with a disinfectant and a very clean rag, rubbing in tiny circles – aroundandaroundandaround watching the liquid dry in streaks until he scrubbed it off. He tied his hair up in a pony tail and washed his hands in the big basin of a sink.
"Morning, Riku!" Yuna was a real vet and jeez did she fit the part.
Awful as it was of him, he kind of wanted to slap her smiling face sometimes, but mostly he liked her. She was annoyingly mommish but he liked her. The first time he'd had to help her put a dog to sleep he'd had a panic attack; he couldn't breathe through his mouth or his nose, felt like he was inhaling through his ears and his limbs were buzzing. She had sent him out of the room. She hadn't made him come back in. "Everyone reacts like that," she said. "It's normal to react like that at first."
She hadn't made him help a second time.
"Morning," he said, tossing the rag in the sink and handing her a clipboard.
"Weather's just awful, isn't it?" she asked conversationally, putting on a white coat over her clothing. "Apparently it's supposed to snow until tomorrow morning."
"Really?" He sounded like a hopeful little kid. Sora said that's what everyone did if it started snowing when you were in school. Someone, a bored someone who never paid attention and always looked out the windows, would exclaim "Hey, is it snowing?" if it had just started, or, depending on the person, "It's snowing! IT IS!" And it was then mandatory for everyone to get up from their desks and stare out the windows, or at least, that was how it had worked for Riku's boyfriend up until the end of freshman year and halfway through sophomore year.
So you had to talk about school being cancelled and everything.
How come work wasn't ever cancelled?
Well. He got to look at snow fall all day long. No sunshine.
He liked it up here.
Yuna was nodding and running her finger over her clipboard. "All day long," she said. "Frightful, isn't it?"
"Nah," Riku grinned at her. "I don't own a car, so for me it's just pretty."
"What, and you don't own a sidewalk?" she laughed and bent down to open one of the cupboards.
Riku raised his eyebrows innocently. "I have tall rubber boots and a lazy boyfriend."
He almost laughed when he said that. Tall-rubber-boots-and-a-lazy-boyfriend. That was a good way to go through life, even if it meant having a tight iron band around your chest once every very little while. Because it always went away.
"Ah," she laughed. "I guess I envy you that. Though sometimes I can convince Tidus it's manly to do all the shoveling by yourself."
Tidus was her handsome blond husband. For a pretty brunette wife. Riku had never been to their house but Yuna kept a picture of them, holding their daughter in front of their house, on her office desk. They probably had a dog and a white picket fence, or at least they had a mowed lawn and maybe a down payment on their car, and neither one of them would have silver hair until they got really really old.
Sora and Riku weren't old farts yet, but they didn't mow their lawn.
In the middle of summer it had dandelions grow all over, and clover, and chives and chamomile flowers and then these little purple flowers Riku didn't know the name of.
It seemed like Sora didn't want to be a suburbian. He didn't do what suburbia told him to do. For one thing, he didn't live in it, not really. He acted like a twelve-year-old sometimes. He went up on the roof. Twenty-four years old and he still went up on the roof.
"It's funny how dogs and cats know the inside of folks better than folks do, isn't it?"
- Eleanor H. Porter
Yuna rested her elbows on the table and stared. The cat stared back.
"What're you gonna do with him?" Riku asked at length, fork poised over his microwave lunch.
The thing was brown, and kind of fat, with a wide scrunched up face and matted fur. The tip of its tail methodically twitched. It was lying on the steel table with its head on its legs.
"I don't know. I mean, he's clearly an indoor cat if he was hanging around Mrs. Laurins's house for that long waiting to be fed. Send him to a shelter, I suppose."
"He'll get adopted?"
"We can hope so. He – he?" Digging her fingers under the beast's stomach, she lifted it up bodily to look at its underside. "She. Probably she. Anyways, we have no idea of telling how old she is, really. Could be five, could be fifteen. Heck, she could drop dead from old age in a year." She set it down again.
"So?"
"So nothing. It's just that strays from shady origins are…just never quite as popular as the kittens, you know? And there are always kittens available."
"Yeah, that and it looks like her face got stepped on and then run over."
"Oh, come on. That's just the way the breed looks. Though I imagine she's a mix…" Yuna put her forefinger and thumb behind the cat's ears and started rubbing. The cat closed her eyes. "Aw. What a softie! Huh? Who's a softie? What a softie you are!" cooed Yuna, to the mild and understanding contempt of Riku Tepes. He went ahead and scraped around the sauce at the bottom of his microwave food and ignored the crazy cat noises.
"Huh," she said at length. "Not…a cuddler, this one." The cat had not moved from its spot, front legs crossed and squashed bulldog face condescendingly content.
"I guess that's something we have in common," Riku said, hopping off the counter. He ducked into the kitchen to put his container in the food sink and washed his hands distractedly, wiping the water on his scrubs when he came back in.
When he had first started being a vet's assistant he'd thought scrubs made him look professional and respectable. Now he was just annoyed by them because the pants were really too thin for the winter.
Yuna was thoughtfully petting the cat, just her pointer finger on the top of its head. "You don't have any pets, do you?" she said.
"I don't think we can afford a cat," Riku told her simply, checking for the next appointment. It was a good day today. No killing anything.
"What? A fully-grown one? I bet you can. Come on, I'll even do the vaccinations free, how about that? They really aren't that expensive once they're grown up. It's the kittens that you have to worry about. You always see people bringing in their kittens, don't you? For health problems or feeding them the wrong food or they fell down the stairs by accident. Once they've gotten big – especially ones like this, 'cause you can tell she can take care of herself."
Riku clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from giggling out loud. It wasn't funny, not at all. But he remembered that pubescent voice, the cracked French, I just need a second, okay? Just…give me a second. And the warm uncomfortable weight on his shoulder, the one that made him tense up and try to pretend this was normal, the unwanted closeness.
He shrugged. It was too storybook, anyways. Abandoned cats.
"You're a cat person, aren't you?" Yuna smiled at him brightly and rubbed a finger under her nose (it was cold season, after all). "No matter how the dogs love you, huh?"
"Uh…" He wanted to ask if they could go back to working before he started feeling antisocial again. "Dunno."
"Never had one growing up?"
Riku coughed and looked out the window, where the snow was piled up nearly six inches and made his hair look dirty and greasy. Call that white? I'll show you white. Look outside, you moron. And laughing inwardly.
"Not really. Sora had a cat but it never really liked me."
"Aw," she said again. It was something she had a habit of saying just at the moments when Riku thought an 'aw' was completely inappropriate, too; she thought things were brave and cute and noble when really they were sad and misguided and futile, but she was his employer.
After a few more minutes, and walking around to check on the dogs that were waiting to be picked up after overnight stays in the cages and worrying over a cat that wouldn't stop puking up all the food it ate, Riku shyly tapped Yuna on the shoulder.
She had a bunny in her hands. She was seriously holding a bunny. Honestly. This woman.
"What…would happen to her if I don't take her home?" he asked, worried that this would only be the beginning of the siege of adopted strays.
"Well," Yuna said thoughtfully, waving at the receptionist to let her know she was done and ready for another patient. "Like I said, she'll go to the shelter. I suppose she could luck out and get adopted. Though, honestly, with cats you never know – I mean, we don't know her age, and people don't want to get attached to something that might die in six months. Especially since there's not usually a shortage of kittens."
She was milking it, he knew, but he suspected there was truth in her words. It made sense, anyways. Besides, there was no getting around the fact that the beast was ugly as fuck. She wasn't endearing or endearingly gruff, didn't have a ripped ear from cutesy alley cat tumbles, didn't care for the fluffy pink cat toy in the office, and squirmed awkwardly when she was picked up.
He refilled a water container and looked at her in the cage across the room. She had turned around and was staring at the wall, her fat brown tail still twitching as she licked one paw. The corner of her eye was visible, flicking nervously around as if she feared being interrupted in her activity.
He thought about the cat being put to sleep because nobody wanted her. Sitting down on the floor, he planted his hands on either side of his legs.
"Poor little unwanted kitty," he said sarcastically. And, much more sincerely, "Maybe I'll take you home to the other abandoned things. You can kill birds."
The cat didn't look up or respond. Its ears swiveled in his direction briefly and reverted.
"Ri-ku! She won't eat her food! What do we do if she's one of those feral cats that only eats raw meat?"
Sora had his hands on either side of the cat, holding it rather forcefully in front of the two plastic bowls with food and water. It was makeshift but Riku liked it. The cat, however, was extremely displeased to have its compressed Persian face be smushed into kibble.
A disinterested smirk on his face, he drew the curtains to keep the heat in and made it a point to move his tall rubber boots onto the boot tray to keep from warping the wood with melting snow. "Let the beast go, Sora," he said. Sora had dealt with the advent of the beast quite well. "She's been here for an hour, she doesn't know what's safe to eat, and she's used to other kinds of food. Probably scraps or meat or whatever the lady who found her fed her before. She's not like a dog, she won't just try to eat anything that fits in her mouth."
"Saïx would eat anything if you waved it in front of his face."
"Yeah, well, Saïx was weird."
Kneeling on the floor, Sora kept his hands around the cat and squeezed her a little tighter. "Come on, kitty…" he urged.
"Sora," Riku said, coming to stand next to him. "Let the cat go. She'll figure out it's food when she gets hungry enough."
"Your solution is to starve it? She."
For an odd moment, Riku caught himself up in the debate between calling the cat she and calling the cat it. He put a hand on Sora's shoulder. "Hey, which one of us is the vet's assistant? Today we had a lady come in freaking out because her cat kept puking."
"And?"
"And nothing. She freaked out too much and the thing was fine. It just puked a couple of times and then went back to normal. She hasn't called us or anything so I assume it hasn't started puking again."
There was a long while where Sora didn't say anything, just sat on the kitchen floor, twisting his fingers in the fur of the very confused cat. Where he ran into a thick matted tangle he'd start prying it apart with his fingers. He laughed. "Things take care of themselves, huh?"
Riku nodded at that and sat down next to him, just staring at the cat. He was reluctant to touch her. "Dogs die alone, if they can," he said. "Yuna was telling me about it. If you let him, an old dog will leave the house and go under the porch or into the forest, or even under a bush, and just die real quiet and without any help. No bells. No whistles. He'll just die sleepy and easy."
At that, Sora didn't say a word. He stared at the wall and chewed on the inside of his cheek. And after a while, "My mom had a dog that ran away when it was thirteen years old. It could barely walk but it still ran away and they never found it. Do you think that's what happened?"
Riku nodded again, and reached out to brush the back of his crooked pointer finger against the cat's side. She wasn't very soft. He expected they'd have to cut off all her fur to get most of the mats out.
"Probably," he said. "You'd be surprised how things carry on without our help."
At which Sora slumped against Riku's shoulder and heaved the fat beast onto his lap. The cat crossed her front legs and did nothing else. "Even though you put things to sleep. I can't decide whether or not I like that euphemism."
Putting an arm around Sora's shoulders now, "It's like we think things can't die without our help. There are books about it, you know. About how to die the right way. I saw one in the self-help section walking home."
"That's…kind of really depressing. Besides, isn't death a relative thing or something?"
"We're so not getting into that debate."
The kitchen floor was cold and tiled cheaply, and despite all the snow what he really wanted was to eat some ice cream. His favorite thing was digging out all the chunks of weird stuff like chocolate or nuts. Some part of his mind registered it as a treasure hunt. But Sora had a warm head.
"Why not? It's a valid debate!" There was the barest twinge of annoyance there, at an obstinate kid who argued for the sake of argument. Like a sore muscle in the morning.
"Because I think we tried this before, and anyways, it doesn't have an answer. You just keep going around with the same logic and never coming to any satisfying conclusion."
"Duh." Sora frowned and rolled his eyes. "That's the point."
Riku smirked and kissed him on top of his pointy head, which was all there was to be done about Sora Goodwin, really.
"We have to name her! And it can't be something stupid, either. It can't be an adjective. It has to be a real name."
"Why do we have to name her? Look, she's perfectly happy, sitting on the bed, not having a name."
"You can't miss what you never had."
"I don't see why we can't just call her 'cat'."
"Because that's an awful name! You can't tell people you have a cat named Cat."
"I won't tell people that. If they ask, I'll say, 'I have a cat.' And that'll be fine."
"It's demeaning to the animal world."
"Cats in the animal world do not have names."
"Dolphins do."
"Well, they're not cats, are they?"
"We can't just call her cat!"
"I'm calling her cat. Do what you want."
"Ri-ku!"
"So-ra."
They did end up calling her cat. Sora couldn't decide on a name for too long and Riku was pretty consistent.
He did not mention, of course, how it was thoroughly bad enough that they were two gay guys living in a house with a cat. Because he was worried Sora would just get more.
The cat liked all the places Riku liked, maybe just to annoy him. The chair in front of the window, the left side of the bed, Sora's pillow. Sora. He would lift the thing up bodily and take her place, and if the cat came back, so be it. She was a very good reading cat; she didn't move much and she was warm, and soft once they cut her hair short.
The closest they got to naming her was a derogatory nickname. "Hey, Monstroke, that's my chair. Up we go, girl." Sora had thought that the sperm whale's name in Pinocchio was Monstroke, not Monstro, when he was a little kid. But mostly they just called her cat, and she minded her own business.
Riku forgot she was there sometimes and then he'd wake up and she'd have wormed her way in between him and Sora, right next to their bellies where it was warmest. It took maybe two months to get over the initial fawning until she properly settled in. He never quite stooped to having philosophical conversations with her.
It was all well and cute, really, except for that she was just a cat, and Riku was just a guy with tall rubber boots and a moth fixation and a boyfriend. She couldn't tell him, when he asked the blank space around her, when you'd succeeded at life.
(That was a thing he was thinking about a lot. About if he was actually like, a grown up? And if he was a grown up, why didn't he feel like one? And if that was how they all felt, when would you ever stop feeling that way and how grown-up feeling was enough?
He didn't know if he had done it right. Sometimes, in his mind, he went back over the steps of his life, one by one, near as he could. He checked to see if he'd missed something. Other nights he gave up on the venture entirely because he couldn't really change it now, could he?
That was how he sometimes felt he went about making decisions: seeing how they worked out for other people. Politics. Books for reading. It was like running a race and you hadn't heard the start signal. He was never trying to win.
So he wanted someone to tell him if he had done it right. Only it seemed like nobody, television and books and actual real people and movies and non-fiction, they couldn't agree. On what made your life good. Everyone said something different, like having lots of sex or being famous or having a white picket fence and a baby and a husband named Tidus or a wife named Yuna or discovering some life-changing thing or going on a grand adventure.
Maybe, for them, it was still Norman Rockwell. Riku imagined that Norman Rockwell, if he had painted two gay men living together, would have given them the quiet wooden house and the cat, and watching really bad chick flicks on Friday nights just because it made him feel a little more human that Sora thought something in the world was just hilariously awful. He never said so, since Sora had probably forgotten about ever saying it as a stupid kid. Since so much sort of a little bit kinda not really changed.
He spent his life worrying about whether or not he was doing the normal thing, and if the normal thing was really the same as what he wanted, and he didn't have to do that with Sora and the days he realized that early in the morning before his boyfriend woke up next to him were the really really really really good ones. The fuzzy satisfied curl over and bury yourself in the smell of fresh dirt and vegetables, grass, walking outside in a place where acid rain hadn't touched.
The tight iron band around his chest wasn't stifled. It was periodically lifted and then placed back, because, he figured, you couldn't have happy without sad. Which wasn't very profound, but he'd never really absorbed it before. But it was never stifled like a sneeze in a church.
It suited him, this way of living. Even if he wasn't a grown-up.)
The day Sora turned forty-seven years old he didn't say much at dinner, or when they went to bed, or when the dog jumped up and started bothering him to go outside. Riku didn't ask why he was acting so strangely, because Sora had told him a week before that his mother and father had died at ages forty-five and forty-six, respectively.
"I remembered that as a time when my heart leapt up. I was glad to be on an island where a child would point out a rainbow to a stranger, even though the grown-ups of the island resorted to plastic surgery. Maybe if I read the Romantic poets and worshiped nature and became a vegetarian, my heart would leap up again. Probably not. Not as high up - I was sure of that."
- Jule Hecht, Do the Windows Open?
But when they were still young, and when one of them was still in grad school, and one of them worked for a company to make advertisements and do special effects for movies, they didn't have much in the way of money. It was a miracle finding a house as cheap as theirs, even if it was an understandable miracle because who the hell wanted to live that near a highway. So as much brotherly love as he felt, Sora could only afford to go visit Roxas once every couple of years. Fire insurance wasn't really all that much, after all. Enough for college and a house but not three thousand some-odd miles of separation.
Their third trip back, age twenty-four again (and they'd just left the cat in the house with an automatic feeder and a cat flap because she could take care of herself), found Riku watching the horizon from a plane. It was kind of funny watching Roxas try to interact with him maturely. Hug? Because you're like my brother-in-law, practically? Okay, but I've met you four times in my entire life and you spent most of the first two talking to your brother and ignoring me. Fourth time was the charm, apparently.
It didn't seem fair. Axel was in his late twenties and he seemed to know what he was doing. Maybe because seventeen-year-old Riku had seen the man in his early twenties as an adult back then already; a mindset if you'd never seen him as a kid.
Maybe Axel didn't feel like a grown-up either.
It was this sort of thing that went through his mind way over the ocean, after entertaining thoughts about crashing. And thinking how fast they'd fall and what his thoughts would be. Maybe something noble, he'd hold Sora's hand and say he loved him, that holding hands was a nice way to die and it was a shame they didn't have time to take off their shoes first, but instead he'd probably just be thinking about those things and not doing them. He'd be wondering, in his last moments, what he ought to do with them. What he dwelt more on was the feeling; he wondered if he would become used to the idea in the seconds or minutes it took to reach the ocean, in the minutes it took to drown. Or if he would feel panicked when he died still.
He imagined hurtling downwards, feeling a rush of air like in an elevator, flying without power and always downwards from gas to liquid, from alive to dead. That dichotomy, specifically, seemed foreign to him – you were alive or you were dead and there wasn't an in between. There were in betweens for everything else.
It was these familiar lines of thought that he traveled when he found himself with too much time on his hands.
The strangest thing struck in his mind then, ringing softly in his ears. He hoped, if the plane's engines ruptured or a storm broke off a wing, or if it simply died, that when they went plunging hopelessly into the ocean, he would see a whale. Staring out the window of a sky monster at the shape of some natural sea beast, who, he imagined, would look at them calmly: oh, a fallen plane. Yes, well, that's the order of things, isn't it? Planes from the sky, and whales do not. Oh, turn around little man; I have interest whatsoever in watching you drown.
He liked that thought. Of seeing a whale just before your lungs were filled with water and you died deaf with shoes on. Considered it a decent consolation prize.
That did not, of course, mean he was particularly looking forward to the plummeting downwards bit, but if it had to happen he wanted to see something alive down there to remind him life didn't end with the plane.
Why he was so thoroughly fixated on the idea of a plane crash in the middle of the ocean evaded him, but he attributed it to fatigue.
"Hey," Sora's hand grazed his over their shared armrest.
"Hey," Riku said back. He turned his eyes to look at their fingers.
Sora was in morning mode; his eyes were bleary and his hair was flattened and compressed in most places. And he had his adorable sleepy smile (that Riku ever thought anything was adorable was a secret, of course). "I have a question for you."
"What?"
He blinked and narrowed his eyes. "Dammit," he muttered. "I forgot. It was a really good question."
"That's okay. You'll remember it as soon as you forget you're trying to."
"Yeah, probably. Ugh, I hate that about my brain." He stuck out his lower lip and looked directly upwards as if into his forehead. "I'm sorry, brain. I didn't mean that."
Riku, who was really too tired to find that at all funny, laughed halfheartedly and toed off his shoes. Sora still did that curling up with nothing but socks on his feet thing on airplanes.
Another thing he kept thinking about: and it was sentimental, really, far too sentimental for his own good: silly, even, but it was there and he liked to rethink it when he felt mushy: he still loved Sora because he had not fallen hard and fast, had not avait le coup de foudre pour Sora, but had expanded his world – and Sora had been there waiting on the periphery. He fit in perfectly, naturally, even, not like a moth, alive then dead suddenly and horrible and crushed against the floor, not the sudden dichotomy. Instead, Riku fancied it was like the very old, sick dogs being put to sleep; they died asymptotically, slowly, in a thin fuzzy line. And such was the case for Sora: fuzzy and indistinct, without a moment of sudden heartfelt realization. Snuck in and you were used to it before you realized you couldn't live without it.
He had decided that there's wasn't one of those relationships that died out, that they were not the naïve people who knew nothing about what to do with love besides get married and make babies. Maybe that was naïve of him, too, but he liked to imagine they wouldn't ever get sick of each other, not really. It gave him a happy little jump in his heart when he was feeling introspective and natural and looking at Sora in the right light, Sora who wasn't maybe-gay and who didn't cry every Pi day, who didn't understand the sanctity of moths but who understood fully the beauty of an old dog crawling off to die under a bush in the woods when it knew.
And then Sora said, "Riku?"
"Yeah, Sora?"
He turned his head down to look at their fingers, just barely touching, and their feet; both socked and curled up in opposite directions. Riku's rubber boots on the floor in front of them.
"Do you wanna get married?"
Everyone on the plane was, for the most part, asleep; they were crossing over a time zone. Riku's was the only open window. He didn't much care if that made it hard for other people to sleep.
"I didn't think we could do that. Oh – you mean those domestic partnership things?"
"Yeah. I meant like that. Just…not a wedding or something stupid like that, but like a document. So I own half of you and you own half of me."
Riku thought about it.
"No," he said after a while. "That would be silly."
Sora smiled at him.
A sleepy light blue graphic designer French orphan smile.
"I thought so," he said. "I hoped you'd say that."
Tall-rubber-boots-and-a-lazy-boyfriend.
Riku Tepes was really very human.
"I'd never thought of that. I forgot that things can get better. I thought things could only get worse."
- Julie Hecht, Do the Windows Open?
Well, damn.
It's over.
Answer the questions? Leave a review? Up to you, really.