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He's the pages of a book, the delicate spine, and the harsh bang when it flies across the room, out of the hands of his owner and into the chest of another. Fights-- he doesn't like those, not unless they're written on his pages, and even then, he only likes them because they are his, and they keep him company. The touch of a reader is a terribly lonely thing.
They fall into his world, and he falls into theirs, feels their hopes and desires and fears all through the touch of their hands, the way they turn the pages when they're sad, when they decide to set him down and never return. He likes the heartless readers, the ones who get bored easily because their minds are full of color and noise, and then a steady silence he calls Forgetfulness (Neglect).
His favorites are the careful readers, the ones who return, the ones who turn his pages like it's a religious experience, or like they're falling into him. And he imagines, for a moment, that he can fall into them too, that he can kiss their fingertips as he has a thousand times a page, and they will kiss him back with their remembrance. He imagines sometimes that he is not sewn and sawed and hacked, and somehow fashioned into a compact mess of pages and ink.
He imagines he has limbs and soft hair and colored eyes like little bits of glass. He imagines he looks like the people his pages speak of. He wants their heart most of all, their soft human touch and that look behind the glass in their eyes that makes them so beautiful. Like little windows on soft velvet. They are his sunset, his picnic set out on the beach, his ultimate dream.
The feeling doesn't come for a long time, and he's already been passed through children's hands, puddles, shoved in mailboxes, used to pass notes-- there's no telling the secrets he contains. And he loves them, all the hands (gentle and cruel), and all the voices (loud and soothing), and all the hair that brushes against his pages, the food dropped, the nail polish spilled, the pen marks, and the complaints.
But then he is passed into the hands of someone new, and he gets that peculiar feeling, that one his pages exalt and moan and weep about. He doesn't understand it but he knows it, like that feeling has been alive for thousands of years before his story was written into existence. This one, the beautiful reader, liked to write a lot. He wrote notes in the margins, gently at first, and then with such passion and vigor in his young heart that it made the pages ache for the feel of it-- because his solitude had finally been broken, and a new story was spilling forth.
"You should read it," the beautiful one said. "By Cesc--" He squinted down at the cover, "--Fabregas or something."
"Alright," said the other one (his friend or something like it), but he seemed to lack interest. "But you finish it first, Iker."
Iker was Iker from then on and he read him (Cesc, he was called after that, after the one who penned him into the world) over and over again, and when he grew weary of the words, he spoke in the margins instead. Sometimes he asked questions--wrote them, spoke them, thought them.
For years, Iker opened the book and read with care and delicacy and love, and then his energy waned. His breath was harsher, his eyes were sharper, and he read, not for the beauty of it, but beacuse he longed for answers, and he relied on the pages for the only kind of help he knew how to ask for. Cesc felt his story being chipped away at because Iker no longer gave; he ceased to turn the pages with any kind of mercy, and he threw Cesc down afterwards, when he didn't find what he was looking for.
He had once turned the pages with the care and reverence normally reserved for religious texts, but now he tore at them like a sinner looking for the invisible ladder to a Better Place. It doesn't surprise Cesc when the first page tears, or when he is passed on, and then returned, and then pased on again, like Iker was no longer attached, like he no longer believed. No longer needed to console himself with the words that had once been his sustenance.
And then Cesc is given away, and he can't understand Iker's jumbled words, but someone writes a number on the inside of his cover, presses a tag on his front, and he sits in the dust for a long, long time. A dust cloud rises and his hope rises with it, but he remains on the shelf, longing for the reader who once loved him so completely, so honestly, so genuinely and carefully that Cesc felt like he had glass orbs for eyes and funny looking whip-like limbs for extremities.
He remains on the shelf until his pages are clogged with dust, and he has absorbed so much sadness and love and echoes of footsteps that he feels fit to burst. It isn't until his pages start to yellow that he is purchased by new, young, yet somehow achingly familiar, hands. He travels, is lost in bumps and whirring engines and wind sailing past darkened windows. And then the young hands pass him on to the shaking, wrinkled, loving hands of an old man, and it is then that he realizes-- when Iker traces his name on the front cover with an open-mouthed look of pious hope-- that he is home.
"Oh," Iker exhales, and he breathes the dust of the pages, erasing every echo of sadness or pain, and Cesc's story is broken into and born anew.
Iker opens, flips the page, begins to read aloud, and he breathes the story like it gives him life. His voice is feeble, broken, but the reverence returns.