You sat in silence for a while. And then:

"So, there's this young woman sitting on a bench in a park. Sun's shining. Birds singing. Flowers blooming. And she looks miserable. Eyes all puffy. You know, like she's all cried out."

You glanced over at Kurt. He was staring straight ahead, eyes narrowed.

"Eventually, a man walks by, and sees her. At first he wasn't going to say anything, but she looks so sad, he can't help it. So he comes up and asks her what's wrong, and how she can be sad on such a beautiful day. She says, 'I'm so worried about the future,' and shakes her head."

You sat and waited.

"The man... he just stands there, he thinks a bit, and then he smiles and he says, 'If you're so worried, you should go see the fortune teller down the street. She'll solve all your problems, she knows everything.'"

Kurt turned and looked at you. "The woman bursts out into tears. 'I am the fortune teller,' she sobs, hiding her face in her hands."

You blinked. Kurt turned away, continued staring into nothingness.

"... Hey, that's pretty good," you offer lamely.

"No, it's really not."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You did something you never thought you'd do.

You started a journal. Journaling. That's the verb form. What an idiotic word.

Each page is a day. One out of three-sixty-five. You are careful to detail as much as possible-weather (temperature, clouds, humidity?), who you saw (in what circumstance?), where you went (by foot, by car?), what happened. Your fingers grew cramped. The pages bled. The pens ran dry, clawed uselessly at the paper. Ink found a dark home beneath your nails. You couldn't use a pencil-you didn't trust yourself with an eraser.

You needed to keep it all straight. Linear. Sequential. A to B, no detours or shortcuts or dimensional portals to C. You carefully wrote the time next to every single event, trivial as it may be. You kept trying to set up a kind of system-with columns or charts-but they never lasted more than a few pages. Columns or charts are straight, but they aren't straight. Stream of consciousness had to do.

Because it had happened already. You would REGRESS, and you suddenly couldn't figure out where you were, or what happened. You would sit Damien and Kurt down and have them, painstakingly and meticulously, contextualize.

After the third time, Damien flung the journal at you.

"I hate Cornell."

"You want wide ruled instead, asshole?"

You settled for Cornell.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Sometimes, you'd just sketch. Well, no, sketching isn't the right word. You'd... not draw, but let your pen wander. Let it go where it wanted to go, wherever that was.

In slow, easy, lazy circles.

And sometimes, when you'd turn to a new page, you'd find it staring up at you, a black and white eye, unblinking, everseeing.

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"How far back can you go, you think?"

Damien's words hung in the air, and you looked at them, the way they obscured Damien's face in the evening light. They didn't look much like Damien's words, the way they flickered and shuddered.

"I don't know. It's..." You shrug. "It's like... the ocean, maybe. You can go back farther and farther, and you know there's more, but..." You shrug again. "I don't know. I don't think I can know."

Damien nodded, gazing into the distance.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When you were younger, sometimes you'd hear a scratching at your window. Fingers hunting for a frame.

And, in due time, the window would tortuously rise, creaking like an old coffin, and into your room would clamber Damien, mud on his boots.

"Sleep on the floor," you'd mumble, not bothering to roll over.

"Fuck that and fuck you," he'd grunt, burrowing into bed and stealing some of your sheets. If he was in a better mood, he's take his boots off beforehand. That was rare.

And you'd sleep like that, back to back. You'd feel Damien quiver with tension, at first, that would ebb out of his shoulders and spine, into you, into the world, and his breathing would become slow and even.

You'd stare at the wall in the dark, listening to the war in his lungs, waiting for him to go to sleep, before you allowed yourself to.

You'd rouse yourself in the morning, and he'd be gone, leaving prints of dirt in his wake. You'd see him that day at school, or at the field, or wherever-but he never brought it up.

So you didn't, either.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You know them by their footsteps.

Damien's are sharp, hard, sudden, determined. Ever moving forward, head lowered, chin tucked, horns at the ready. Train tracks and Roman roads may as well appear wherever he is marching, for those who stand in his way do not stand for long.

Kurt's are measured. Not a swagger, or a saunter, or anything like that, as easy as his arms may swing. But it's less like he moves, and more like the Earth moves under him. Atlas, inverted.

Even when one of his feet always touches the ground a little before the other, the Earth submits to his tread.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Your nose bleeds. You sniff, wipe at it. The taste of iron makes you remember:

"That it? That fucking it, you fucking faggots?"

You and Kurt and Jason strained to hold Damien back, but once he'd tasted blood he wouldn't stop until his veins are full. "Let it go, man-"

"Fuck that!" he snarled, easily dragging you forward a few steps. "These preppy fucks think they can run everything? Think banker daddy and trophy mommy will protect them? Fuck-that!"

James was still sputtering and gasping on the asphalt, his friends crowding over him, trying to help him up, but he swatted their hands away, pride a hot ember still glowing within him.

"Polo-wearing dickless queerbait," Damien sneered.

James wiped the blood from his nose, wincing. "You just made a mistake."

Damien scoffed. "Yeah? Come a little closer, I'll make a dozen more, Trust Fund."

"Damien!" you hissed.

He looked down at you. His eyes were dilated, cut lip pulled back to show red and white teeth. "Let go of me."

"No," you and Kurt uttered in unison.

"Shit, man, can we just go before the cops show up?" Jason whined.

The next day at school, Damien wasn't in class. You and Kurt glanced at each other from across the classroom.

For some reason, you weren't too worried.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You stared down at the paper.

That's not a spiral.

That's a fucking tornado.