Archive of Our Own

The perch situated above the main clock face where Hayner and his friends like to eat ice cream isn’t that high up, not really. It isn’t even the highest location accessible in Central Station- visitors can take a guided tour that leads them through the historical and artistic significance of the landmark, concluding with an elevator ride to the upper dial, where they can gaze out over Twilight Town from behind the safety of thick glass and golden clock hands. Turning around towards the building’s north end, the train station itself is dwarfed by the mountain just outside of city limits, providing a true sense of scale. And anyone standing by the entrance of the clocktower can clearly see those seated at its top.

Which is not to say that anyone shouting from the station plaza can be heard from the exterior overlook.

“What is he saying?” Olette asks the others, leaning as far forward as she dares in hope that the extra inches will bestow an answer.

“Who knows,” says Hayner, more devoted to his sea salt ice cream. His next words come to them through a mouthful of popsicle. “Who cares?”

“I dunno, it could be important,” says Roxas.

“Since when is anything Seifer says important?” Hayner scoffs. “I mean, look at him!”

Stories below them, Seifer Almasy is shaking his fist in the air and stomping a boot-clad foot on the ground. He’s accompanied by the entire Twilight Town Disciplinary Committee, with Rai and Fuu standing sternly behind him and Vivi doing his best to appear tough on his right. Whatever he’s yelling is distorted by the wind and the distance, at most a faint staccato of unintelligible noise, and the audio quality only gets worse on the couple occasions Rai joins in. The longer Seifer shouts without a visible reaction by the quartet, the more animated his motions become. A group of commuters exiting the train station leave him a wide berth and scurry hurriedly out of the plaza.

“Maybe we should go down there,” says Olette, but everyone else seems to have returned to their default setting of ignoring Seifer.

“Olette, your ice cream’s melting,” Pence helpfully points out.

“Oh!” Olette snaps her bar up in an attempt to prevent the melted liquid from dripping onto her hand, and a few drops soar off into space. While she scrambles around to procure a napkin, Hayner homes in on the drops’ descent. He glances at his own ice cream, to Seifer below, and then to his ice cream again.

“I have an idea,” he says, a gleeful grin breaking out over his face. “Watch this.”

He raises his arm and stretches the hand holding his popsicle back behind his head, before hesitating. “Wait a minute,” he says, and Hayner gets to his feet, careful to keep his balance on the narrow ledge. He resumes his stance. Underneath them, Seifer stops yelling, and cranes his neck to discern what is taking place.

“And, fire!” Hayner cries, flicking his ice cream bar down at a sharp angle.

Melted ice cream slips off the outside of the bar and flies from the perch towards the Disciplinary Committee. They don’t seem to notice what’s coming until the liquid projectiles smash onto the ground several feet in front of them, leaving short, dark streaks on the stone. The group huddles around the splotches, which offers Hayner the perfect opportunity to try again. This time, Seifer sees them coming and leaps backwards, pushing his posse with him. They’re a tangle of limbs and reignited anger as Seifer starts screaming louder than ever. His right arm still wedged under Rai, his left leg twisted with Fuu’s, and Vivi clinging to his midsection, Seifer heaves himself up like a drowning man. Furiously, he attempts to drag all four of them onward with sheer rage alone.

“Hey, I can almost tell what he’s saying,” Pence remarks. “You’re nearly there.”

“Don’t encourage him!” Olette says, but she’s watching the proceedings with fascination as well.

Hayner nearly has his targets lined up for the perfect shot, but the shrewd perception of Fuu thwarts him. Before Seifer can haul them forward to their doom, she pulls him back by the collar of his jacket and points up at Hayner, then over at the collection of drop marks. The gears turn in Seifer’s head and he smirks. Cautiously, they straighten out all their separate body parts and retreat a few steps, outside of Hayner’s range of fire. Hayner flicks the popsicle three more times, but he can’t close the gap.

“Well, it was a good try,” Pence sighs.

“It’s not that far, I just have to get the angle right!” says Hayner.

“You’re snapping your wrist too much,” says Roxas. “Keep it stiff.”

He rises and joins Hayner on the ledge so that he can demonstrate the technique. The next attempt is better, the farthest one yet, but Seifer remains untouched. He’s laughing now, arms akimbo, and suddenly Hayner is very appreciative of the distance between them, because he’s almost certain he’s being verbally mocked.

Growling, he jerks the popsicle down, an expression of frustration more than anything else, and the rest of his ice cream bar, loosened from the repeated motion, goes sailing off its stick.

“My ice cream!” Hayner despairs, at least until he sees where it lands.

The dessert-based missile streaks through the air, arching just enough to nail Seifer on the head. The electric blue splatter is a bright contrast against the black fabric of Seifer’s beanie, and Seifer staggers, stunned by the impact. Rai and Fuu immediately rush to his side, supporting his swooning body. They steer him out of the battlefield that is the station plaza, Vivi in tow, though by the time they’ve reached the entry arch, Seifer has already recovered from the shock and is swearing retribution. Hayner and the others watch as his enraged form is ferried around the corner and down the hill.

“Bullseye!” Hayner cheers. He and Roxas high five. “Sucks that I lost my ice cream, but it was worth it!”

“‘Twas a noble sacrifice,” Pence nods solemnly.

“Okay guys,” Olette says, giggling, “we should get going. Nothing’s going to top that.”

Their trip down the stairs of the clocktower is full of more laughter and reminiscing. Hayner puts on a dramatic reenactment of the hit, complete with imagined dialogue and sound effects, and Pence regrets not having a good enough camera to capture the original event. He does snap a photo of ground zero after they get to the bottom, handing it over to Hayner as a celebratory trophy once it develops. The wafting, warm air of summer lifts everyone’s spirits, and they say their goodbyes and go their respective ways for the night, unaware of the metaphorical storm growing on the horizon.

--

When Rai bursts into the Usual Spot the following afternoon, rattling the gate and forcing aside the curtain further within, Roxas falls off the pile of empty crates he had been using for a ladder. This is partly because they’re not expecting any visitors to the Usual Spot today, as they don’t expect any visitors any day, least of all Rai. Their hangout locale evidently emits waves that send outsiders walking briskly in the opposite direction (or perhaps that’s a result of its inhabitants’ unique personalities), and they seem to be especially effective against Seifer and his gang, who will prowl around the entrance but never enter. Secondly, inspired by the picture Pence took yesterday, Roxas and Hayner had taken the initiative to set up a victory wall composed of evidence of their all-time successes, and Roxas had been taping up a blurry shot of Rai tumbling off a skateboard when the person in question came banging in. He hastily gets to his feet and shuffles in front of said photo.

“What are you doing here?” says Hayner.

“Seifer’s stoppin’ by in five minutes. Be prepared,” Rai replies.

Hayner folds his arms. “So what? You want us to roll out a red carpet for him?”

“You’d better show him some respect, y’know! You have no idea what you did!”

“Other than completely embarrass him with the coolest trick?”

“Besides that, y’know!” Rai shakes. “Argh, I don’t have time for this! Watch yourselves, or Seifer’s gonna show you what’s what!”

He stomps out, and the group exchange a mix of nervous (Olette), confused (Roxas), and exasperated (Pence) glances. Hayner leans back from his spot on the busted boiler and feigns disinterest, though the involuntary twitch at the corner of his mouth gives him away. Ah, to experience the consequences of your actions. He chooses not to comment on Rai’s strange announcement, and there’s little use in speculating on what Seifer has planned for them. This special meeting, when Seifer is more of a public humiliation kind of guy, is already suspicious, so what is about to ensue will either be an isolated assassination or a load of hot air, neither of which will be pleasant. They sit in tense silence awaiting the promised coming until scuffles and slow footsteps approach from outside.

“Okay, coast is clear Seifer,” they hear Rai murmur. Roxas straightens up, slightly.

As Rai holds back the sheet, Seifer, Fuu, and Vivi enter in one hulking mass. They plod with coordinated steps, bent over and staying low. Their legs are all pressed together, with no space in between. The strangeness of their combined appearance is what grabs everyone’s attention first, but then individual details strike them. The way Rai barely lifts the curtain, peeling the corner up with a finger and his thumb, as opposed to all the bluster he demonstrated before. The large, dark cloak Fuu has draped over the three of them. How Vivi’s eyes dart around the room and skyward towards the openings in the ceiling, even after Rai cuts them off from the rest of the world again.

And then there’s Seifer. Seifer.

Olette isn’t sure she’s seen Seifer in a different outfit since hitting puberty, but today he has exchanged his belly shirt and long coat for a much less flashy article of clothing. As the trio inches apart and Seifer unfurls himself to something more closely resembling his full height, she realizes he’s wearing a baggy gray sweatshirt. Furthermore, the hood is up, with the drawstrings pulled so tightly that it forms a protective casing of cotton around his head, the edges crimped. Combined with his permanent slouch, the hands buried in his pockets, and how he refuses to take his eyes off the floor, it’s the least ostentatious he’s ever been. Rai smacks his hand against the bricks as a makeshift gavel and throws his chest out.

“Seifer’s got something important t’say.”

“Attention,” Fuu reiterates, her glare more threatening than Rai’s muscles.

They defer to Seifer, who looks like he’d rather swallow a colony of bees than speak in this moment. But his gaze drifts around the interior of the Usual Spot, taking in the pipes, the crates, the photos plastered to the wall, and then it flickers to Hayner, sharp and hard as ever.

“Don’t act so full of yourselves, just because we came to you,” he says, proving that patent Seifer Almasy narcissism had never left.

“What’s up with the hood?” Roxas asks innocently, cutting straight to the point and Seifer’s wounds.

Seifer rears back. “You, you—! This is all your faults! You dispshits and your stupid ice cream! You destroyed my beanie!”

Clearly not expecting that answer, Pence frowns. “Really?”

“You heard him! That ice cream ruined Seifer’s hat, y’know! It won’t come out at all, y’know!” Rai yells.

“It’s a really special hat!” Vivi insists.

“Unforgivable,” Fuu says.

“That’s right.” A wide smile creeps across Seifer’s lips, one that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. The temperature in the room drops two degrees, though that’s only because of a train passing by overhead. Seifer appreciates the dramatic effect regardless. “And I expect you to make up for it.”

“I didn’t drop my ice cream bar on you on purpose,” complains Hayner, an already questionable claim. Then he proceeds to shoot himself in the foot. “Not that I wasn’t trying.”

“There! You admit it! Don’t try to deny it, y’know!”

“If I really wanted to hit Seifer, I would’ve just chucked my whole ice cream bar at him! It would’ve been a lot easier!”

“Liar!”

“Really? We can go back to the clocktower and find out! I’d love to throw another ice cream at him!”

Roxas catches Olette staring at him with wide eyes and understands the unspoken plea. “Hey, let’s settle down,” he says, holding out his arms in a calming gesture. Hayner eases back, and Rai and Fuu don’t protest, but the expressions on their faces do not indicate appeasement either. “Seifer, is your hat really beyond repair?”

At the mention of his beanie, Seifer tugs on his sweatshirt’s drawstrings. “Yeah, it is. I demand payback.”

“Okay,” Olette gets in quickly, before Hayner can lodge another objection. “What is it that you want?”

“An apology, for starters. And then you can admit that you’re total losers compared to me, and don’t even deserve to be in my presence,” Seifer sneers. “Oh, and there’s one more thing too.”

“Just get on with it already!” Hayner can already tell that this is going to be painful. Everything that has to do with Seifer is.

Seifer heaves a sigh. Really, did they have to take the fun out of everything?

“Fine. You have to get me a new hat.”

No one responds, at least not directly to him. Olette turns to Roxas and mouths “new hat?” to which he shrugs. By his vacant expression, it appears as though Hayner is still attempting to process the simple combination of words strung together into a sentence.

When the silence stretches out to an uncomfortable point, Pence decides to sacrifice himself to the whims of Seifer.

“A new hat, huh?” He taps out a rhythm on his thighs. “What kind of hat?”

“Whatever you can find, as long as it’s befitting of my station. Impress me. Be creative. I will accept crowns,” says Seifer.

“A hat,” Hayner stammers, finally catching up. “Is that why you’re wearing a hood? Because you don’t have a hat?”

“Yes lamer, I’m the kind of man who always needs a hat. It’s not that hard to understand.”

Hayner’s gaping mouth implies otherwise, but Seifer’s not here to attend to the needs of morons. Their business wrapped up, he claps his hands together. Fuu swoops to his side, enveloping him in the cloak once more, and Rai departs to scout out their return route. Before leaving, Seifer runs a hand over his hood to doublecheck that it’s still securely fastened, and provides one last order.

“I expect my first offering tomorrow. Be at the Sandlot at nine o’clock, on the dot.”

With that, and Rai’s all clear, he sneaks out of the Usual Spot. The moment their footsteps fade, Hayner whirls around to Roxas.

“Are we seriously doing this?” he asks. “There’s no way, right? It’s ridiculous!”

“We did ruin his hat,” Roxas points out. “It’s only fair we make up for it.”

But then he frowns. “I’m not much of a hat guy, though. None of us are.”

“I might have something sitting around,” says Pence, his voice wavering. “But who knows if Seifer’ll like it.”

Olette finally pipes up, having spent the last few minutes deep in thought. “Leave it to me. I might be able to do something”

“Really?”

“Mmhmm. But I’d better get going, or else it’ll be too late.” She gathers her pouch and inspects its contents. “That’ll have to be enough. See you guys tomorrow, and be there on time!”

--

True to form, Olette is the first to arrive at the Sandlot, ten minutes before nine. She settles down with her shopping bag on a bench, but almost immediately stands back up again, too excited to sit still. She takes to playing with the ends of her hair and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet as a distraction. The next to stroll in is Pence, cool as a cucumber in comparison. They pass time by browsing through some photos Pence took recently and making a bet about which of their friends will be the last to show up. Seven minutes after the hour, the outcome is decided. Hayner walks in doing what can only be described as a saunter: hands in pockets, shoulders relaxed, chin pointed defiantly up, doing his best to come off as aggressively casual. Look, it’s difficult to toe the fine line between demonstrating that you don’t give a shit about the demands set for you by other people, but also not wanting your ear talked off by an indignant Seifer. At least, that’s Hayner’s justification. Olette thinks he’s trying too hard. She’s almost positive he scheduled his arrival for exactly this moment, perhaps even slowing his pace down along the way. Pence doesn’t really care; he’s a dollar richer now.

Roxas jogs up three minutes later, apologizing about sleeping in.

“They aren’t here yet?” he asks, head swiveling around in case Seifer and cohorts were lurking in the shadows, ready to ambush him for being late.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Pence agrees.

“They’ve got ten minutes, and then I’m ditching,” Hayner says. “Olette, tell me you didn’t actually waste money on that jerk.”

She swings her bag by its straps. Whatever she’s brought must not be too heavy, nor fragile, nor Seifer’s requested crown in disguise. “It’s fine, Hayner! I just wish he would get here already. I think he’s really going to like it.”

“Well, let’s hope so,” says Pence. “Oh! Speak of the devil.”

The devil wears a beret, though not particularly with confidence, and is flanked by Rai and Fuu, Vivi bringing up the rear. They aren’t as densely congregated as the day prior, nor are they moving as surreptitiously. When Rai steps a little too close to Seifer as if to block him from view, Seifer forces him aside with a strong arm. But his teeth are clenched tightly together, and when he opens his mouth to speak, it’s as if every muscle in his jaw has to loosen and then unlock before the words can come to him.

“Well? Where is it?”

“Not even going to explain why you’re late?” says Hayner. His eyes are transfixed on the beret, an article of headwear so close and yet so far from the beanie.

“I don’t owe you an explanation,” Seifer says at the same time as Rai blatantly lies, “It’s not like Seifer couldn’t leave the house until he found a hat, y’know!”

“Can it, Rai!” snaps Seifer. He turns back to Hayner, exhales deeply, and pretends as if this entire morning had never happened. “I’m here now, aren’t I? So lemme have it.”

A touch unnerved, but still relatively optimistic, Olette reaches into the shopping bag. “It was a little hard to find, considering it’s summer, but I think it’ll be an appropriate replacement.”

The hat she pulls out isn’t an exact replica of Seifer’s beanie. For one, the material is not a solid black, but a mix of dark, neutral shades that bleed into each other. Roxas doesn’t know whether it’s the color scheme, or if the hat is made of a different kind of fabric, or simply because it’s new, but it looks much softer than Seifer’s old beanie had. He resists the urge to reach out and tactilely confirm it for himself (to his right, Pence’s hand twitches upward and Olette quickly bats it back down). For two, it doesn’t have the character stitched on the front, but that is hardly a stunning loss. None of them know where Seifer had originally gotten his beanie, but they conclude by his previous overreaction it had been from some obscure, hip, now-out-of-business brand.

For three, there is a giant white pom-pom on the top of it.

“I don’t like it,” says Seifer.

“Huh? But it’s so similar to your old hat,” says Olette, her brow furrowed.

“Do you have eyes at all? They’re nothing alike! My beanie was cool, and sleek, and this atrocity—”

“Atrocity? Hey asshole, it’s not an atrocity!” Hayner interjects.

“At least put it on first before deciding you don’t like it,” says Roxas.

It’s too reasonable a request to reject, even for Seifer. Not because he knows that articles of clothing often come across differently whether they’re on a rack or they’re on your body, and you could be mistaking what could be the best purchase of your life for a lifeless garment, but because Seifer believes it’ll shut the peanut gallery up. If he tries it on and hates it, there’s nothing they can do.

“Turn around,” he says.

“Why?” says Roxas.

“I’m not taking off this beret in front of you. Turn around,” Seifer repeats.

“Why don’t you like to be seen without a hat, Seifer? Have Rai and Fuu seen you without one?” Olette asks.

“It’s none of your business! Now do it, or I’ll throw this thing straight in the trash!”

As an expert in getting the answers she wants through pure patience and pressure, Olette squares her shoulders and puffs her cheeks, but Pence averts potential disaster by steering her around. “Just go along with it,” he whispers, and she reluctantly deflates. Roxas joins them, and left alone, Hayner is the last to turn around, eyeing Seifer suspiciously.

“If any of you even think of peeking, I’ll kick your ass,” he warns their backs.

Seifer doesn’t take off the beret right away. He waits fifteen seconds first, safeguarding against the possibility that one of them will be an underhanded sneak and try to catch him in the middle of the transition. When it appears everyone is following his directions, he stretches out the pom-pom cap, positions it over his head, and pauses. This is the most sensitive part of the process.

“How long does it take to change a hat?”

“As long as I say it does!”

In one fluid motion, he sweeps the beret backwards off his head and slides the new hat on. Even though only two days have passed, it feels like it’s been impossibly longer since he last wore a beanie, and he basks in the familiarity. But when Seifer closes his eyes, he can sense the differences. More heat is insulated underneath the wool, and the softness is almost irritating compared to the wear on his beanie. The fact that this hat is so similar in its form only makes its imperfections stand out even more. He pulls the cap over his ears and runs his hand over the side of his head to examine whether there’s a problem with the fit when his fingers encounter the pom-pom.

Honestly, Seifer may have been able to overcome the discrepancies in the beanies’ fabrics if it hadn’t been for the pom-pom. Perhaps he would have been put off at first, but give it enough time and his mild complaints would have faded into the background. The pom-pom, however, the pom-pom is inexcusable. That extra ball of fluff warps his entire silhouette, and with it, his image. When he thinks of pom-poms, he imagines toddlers bumbling around in the snow, or cheerleaders. And Seifer Almasy doesn’t cheer for anyone except himself.

He doesn’t need a mirror, or an outside evaluation. Seifer scoops up the beret and puts it back on.

“You can turn around now. I hated it.”

Hayner whips around in anticipation of seeing Seifer with a pom-pom on his head, but his face falls upon noticing that Seifer has redonned the beret. “What? Where’s Olette’s hat? I thought it was a keeper!”

“Shove it, twerp. That hat was a disgrace.” Seifer sighs. “To think I had such high hopes for you lamers. You’re gonna have to do better than this if you want to make it up to me.”

“Wait, ‘do better than this?’ We have to get another one?” says Roxas.

“What do you think I meant, chicken-wuss? That I’m just going to accept any-old hat you give me? I’m going to be wearing this every day! Until you bring me a good hat, you’re not off the hook.”

He throws the pom-pom hat back at Olette, who catches it with two hands and a frown.

“Better get cracking.”

--
The shiny yellow surface of the hardhat reflecting in the sun can be seen from a mile away, and therefore, so can Seifer.

“It’s like the shittiest beacon,” Hayner comments as they approach.

“Or a warning sign,” adds Roxas under his breath.

Seifer waits for them to come to him before he dramatically swings around and smirks, mood much improved but more insufferable. “Morning, birdbrains. It appears someone did your job for you.” He taps the durable plastic with a finger.

“Who was it? That was very kind of them.” After Seifer’s less-than-satisfied reaction towards her pom-pom hat, it’s difficult to discern whether Olette genuinely means the words she’s saying, or if she’s actually about to beat Seifer over the head with his own construction hat.

None of that is getting through Seifer’s thick skull. “Fuu over here did,” he says, jerking his thumb to where she’s smoothing out a poster for the preliminary rounds of a Struggle tournament taking place in a few hours. Vivi is by her side, holding a stack of extras.

“To protect,” Fuu says, shooting a dirty look at Hayner before returning to her task.

Hayner snorts. Yeah, ice cream from the sky, the most perilous of threats. Next time he’ll drop a brick off the clocktower, let’s see how well the hardhat works then. His delusions of homicide are disrupted by Seifer prattling on.

“I’m the most valuable thing in this town, so naturally all of me should be kept safe.” He stretches out his arms around him as if he could encompass the whole neighborhood.

Okay, that’s it. Hayner’s been good so far, but someone needs to deflate Seifer’s ego, for the good of the planet. “What, you can’t protect yourself?”

Seifer’s eyes glint dangerously. He steps forward. “That’s not what I said.”

“Sure sounds like it. Who’s the chicken-wuss now?”

“Yeah right! Seifer could wipe the floor with you any day, y’know?” Rai butts in. They’re standing practically forehead to forehead, fists raised, waiting to see who’ll issue the first strike, when—

Olette wriggles in between them and pushes them apart, impossibly creating space. “Save it for the tournament, you guys!” It’s a tense couple of seconds in which no one moves, but truthfully, Pence is never terribly worried that any violence is going to break out. Maybe it’s because Seifer sees Roxas’ death glare from over Hayner’s shoulder, maybe not. Rai and Seifer back off first, sneering and marching back to their corner. Once they’re out of hearing range, Olette whispers, “You absolutely have to beat them.”

“That’s the plan,” says Hayner. He sighs and swings his arm around, stretching out his shoulder muscles in an attempt to dispel some of the stiffness. “Whaddya say, Roxas? Wanna go a few rounds to warm up?”

“Oh, you’re on!”

They kill time before the first match with some light sparring (ignoring the insults Seifer sends across the way), then settle back to wait for the officials and rest of their opponents to show up. Oddly enough, some people trickle into the Sandlot from Station Heights and Tram Common, but almost immediately leave again. Olette’s positive she recognizes one of them from school who had competed in the previous tournament, but she reckons that he must have forgotten something at home and had to retrieve it. It’s not until a mother with her child walks in from the Back Alley that they overhear something of note.

“Hmm, they must be doing construction here. We’ll have to take a detour around.”

Instantly, Hayner, Pence, Olette, and Roxas make eye contact with each other, and then whip their heads around to look at Seifer, who was talking obliviously with his posse.

“You don’t think…?” says Olette.

“No…” says Hayner, yet there’s a triumphant tone to his voice and a smile spreading across his face that he’s desperately trying to suppress.

But more and more residents come and go, and more of their conversations reach their ears, and soon even Seifer can’t ignore the peculiar abnormality taking place.

“Huh? Is there construction work going on?”

“They had to have moved the Struggle tournament elsewhere. Did you see a new location on the signs?”

“That’s Seifer! Wow, it’s so impressive that he’s giving up his place in the tournament to help out the town, that’s so like him.”

Even the Struggle Promoter does a doubletake at the yellow hardhat. “Why did no one tell me that the Sandlot was closed, this is a disaster!” he yells as he flees the scene.

Hayner has never seen a train crash in slow-motion (or at regular speed, for that matter, and he hopes to keep it that way), but he imagines this must be what it feels like. It’s horrible and exhilarating and the best part is, it’s not even their fault this time. Okay, in the absolute loosest sense this could all be tied to him dropping his ice cream onto Seifer’s beanie, but it’s not like he told Fuu to give Seifer a hardhat to deceive the whole town into accidentally skipping the Struggle preliminaries. He would tell everyone to turn around, but he’s perversely interested in seeing how far this will go.

“How far this will go” ends with the eight of them standing alone in the Sandlot as the tournament start time comes and goes. Hayner can scarcely believe it. He almost doesn’t want to look at Seifer, to see how badly he’s taking it. I mean, he would freak if he singlehandedly ruined a Struggle tournament, and he isn’t the head of the Twilight Town Disciplinary Committee, the group that’s supposed to be maintaining the order. When heavy footsteps sound from his side of the Sandlot, Pence starts whistling and Hayner pretends to examine his Struggle bat for nicks, until footsteps stop in front of them and it’s impossible to feign ignorance any longer.

Shockingly, Seifer is grinning. “Well, it looks like we’re the only ones going through to the finals.”

“And you’re… okay with that?” Roxas asks.

“Sure. I don’t mind weeding out the morons early. Besides, all of us were going to qualify anyway.”

That’s strangely complimentary of him. Cautiously, Hayner replies, “You still wanna fight?”

Seifer scoffs. “Nah, I’ve seen what you can do. You’re still lightyears behind me. It wouldn’t even be a challenge.” He begins to walk off, but then pauses. “I don’t think I’ll be holding onto this hat, though.”

“Yeah, I think- I think that’s for the best,” says Olette breathlessly.

“Tomorrow. Bring me a new hat. Or you really will get a beating.”

It’s a weird day.

--

Despite all the talk of going to the beach, very few people ever seem to get there. It’s more of a wishful sentiment, an escapist fantasy expressed when trapped in the throes of a stressful, or worse yet, mundane, existence, before being laughed off as unfeasible and returning to the grind. Hayner talks about the beach, dreams about the beach, practically writes sonnets to the splendor of the beach, but for all his lofty descriptions, it’s been six years since he’s been the beach. To be frank, he remembers jack shit. His memories are colored by the joy and sense of wonder he experienced at the time, to the extent that the true details of the beach—the long walk on hot concrete leading up to the sand, the bits of trash and refuse that would wash up on shore, the patches of grass that broke through the sand—have been obscured by the soft touch of nostalgia. Most of what he recalls is tied to specific moments, like a rock that he scaled so that he could see sailboats in the distance and his father telling him that watermelons were too expensive, maybe next time, with everything else being blotted out. If anything, that makes his attachment to the place all the more stronger.

So when Pence comes bearing a straw hat to dedicate to the Seifer appeasement effort, Hayner is visibly and audibly more excited than the actual recipient.

“Is that from the beach?!” he demands, pushing his way in front of Seifer (“Watch it!”) so that he can get a better view.

“Yeah, my family went a couple years ago. We got it from a vendor by the boardwalk.”

“Geez, you’re right, there were a million of those, weren’t there?” Hayner slaps a hand to his forehead. “I completely forgot about them!”

“Seriously? They wouldn’t stop hounding us to buy something. And it only got worse once we did.”

“Hey, it’s been awhile, alright? Excuse me for caring more about good and fun things.”

“Do you think if we got jobs at the beach, they would pay for train passes for the commute?”

“Shit Roxas, you’re onto something! But first we gotta save up to get there. And even if we can’t convince them of our employability—which we will—we have to have our bases covered, we—”

The planning is interrupted by Seifer, agitated that he was being ignored in favor of youthful summer aspirations, shoving Hayner’s face aside. Hayner lets out an awkward squawking noise, and has to be held back by Roxas when he goes to retaliate.

“You’re not doing anything until you replace my beanie, got it?”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Try it on.”

There’s a rustic, unfinished appearance to the straw hat, how the reeds composing the brim jut out rather than being sliced off to form a smooth edge, that Seifer finds charming despite himself. It speaks of adventure to him. In some ways, it can’t be more different from his beanie, but they possess the same innate quality that sends a rush through Seifer’s bones. Maybe this will be the one, and the whole process will be less painful than expected. He almost puts it on right then and there, except there’s a sailor cap currently occupying that space. The agony of always needing something to cover your head.

Seifer takes the hat from Pence and then waves his hand in a shooing motion, signaling for everyone to turn around. They should know the drill by now. The groans from the peanut gallery are not necessary. Once they have all shuffled into place, backs to him, Seifer removes the sailor cap and flips the straw hat onto his head. It feels good. It feels right. His only criticism is that it’s a tad roomier than he’d like, but then again Pence has quite a lot of hair to fit under it. He’s reaching up, lifting off the hat to check whether there’s any sort of liner on the inside, when he spies Hayner trying to catch of glimpse of him out of the corner of his eye.

Instantly, Seifer jams the hat back onto his head and prepares to put the fear of Him into Hayner, that lamer was asking to be pummeled, but a strange sensation has him stopping short. Hayner, who was already reeling backwards in anticipation of receiving a fist to the face, also freezes. His gaze moves to Seifer’s shoulder, where something was accumulating on it.

Seifer feels it first in between the strands of his hair, and then collecting in his ears, and then it’s all over his scalp. It requires every fragment of his self-restraint not to tear the straw hat off then and there, but in exchange, he can’t control the volume of his voice as he bellows at Pence.

“SAND! THERE’S SAND IN THIS HAT, LAMER!”

It’s Pence’s turn to cower from Seifer’s rage. He holds his hands up in front of him, hoping to either pacify Seifer like a wild animal or provide a weak wall of defense prior to his death.

“I- I did get it at the beach!”

“And you didn’t think to clean it? Rai, Fuu, get over here!”

The Twilight Town Disciplinary Committee springs into action, a perfectly choreographed spectacle. They hustle him a couple feet away and lower him to the ground so that he can barely be seen behind their figures. Rai sweeps the back of Seifer’s coat over his head to shield him from unfriendly stares, while Fuu slips the sailor cap back on and whips the offending straw hat halfway across the Sandlot. Vivi ineffectually dusts some sand off of Seifer’s pants.

“That wasn’t necessary,” says Roxas as he follows the trajectory of the discarded hat with his eyes.

Seifer’s still red in the face and breathing hard when he returns to them, his sailor cap just slightly askew. His entire frame was rigid, veins almost visible along his arm muscles, hands clenching into fists at his sides. If only he was coming back from some epic naval battle, and not a tantrum about granular particles of silica.

“That’s enough,” he huffs. “If you pull something like this again, I will put you in the ground.” Then he stalks off, Rai and Fuu in tow.

“You’d better not, Seifer! There might be sand down there!” Hayner calls after their retreating forms. Mercifully for everyone involved, Seifer either doesn’t hear or chooses not to retaliate. “Geez, it’s just a bit of sand. He didn’t even get this worked up about Struggling. What a drama queen.”

“And that’s saying something, coming from you,” quips Pence.

“Hey!”

Olette and Roxas laugh at their friends’ bantering, but Vivi, who had missed his cue to depart with the others, stays silent and hunches over, fiddling with his fingers. Roxas notices his fretting first and kneels on the ground in front of him so that they’re at the same level.

“What’s up Vivi?”

“Seifer- Seifer seemed really mad. And I don’t want him to be upset.”

“It’ll be fine. He just needs some time to cool off.” Roxas glances over to Hayner to confirm. Hayner shrugs. Like he cares. “Look, if you’re so concerned about it, why don’t we pick out a hat for him together? Something that he’ll like.”

“Really?” Vivi’s eyes light up. At least, Roxas thinks they do. It’s hard to tell when someone’s eyes are yellow ovals.

“Yeah. I have some extra money from delivering letters. Let’s go.”

Roxas takes Vivi’s hand and waves goodbye as they leave. Hayner salutes him. “A better man than all of us.”

--

Seifer sports the tall, dark top hat for a couple hours, to Vivi’s delight. He parades around Station Heights with it, boasting that he should have a cane and monocle to go with it, and then he’d truly run the town. There’s a close call when Seifer, so caught up in the act and etiquette, nearly tips the hat at the Candy Shop clerk as she passes, but he remembers at the last minute and merely nods. After that, he withdraws to the Sandlot, where he and the rest of the Disciplinary Committee pass the time in a manner similar to most of their lazy afternoons. They play cards, have practice Struggle matches, and yell at anyone foolish enough to tread on their turf.

When the clocktower’s tolls echoing from up the hill indicate that evening has come, Seifer turns to Vivi. “It’s a good hat,” he begins. “But I can’t Struggle in it. It’d fall off way too easily.”

The merry mood that had bolstered Vivi all day disperses. He collapses in on himself and looks at his feet. “I understand, Seifer.”

Seifer claps him on the shoulder. “Hey, hey. I can’t have it on all the time, but I’ll wear it again. Thank you.”

Whatever happiness Vivi had felt before, it was nothing compared to pure elation running through him now. He practically scales the buildings on his route home, giggling wildly and adding in extra somersaults as he pleases.

If Hayner weren’t so fond of Vivi as well, he would have gagged. Seifer being nice is too weird.

--

The subsequent day, Olette tries again, entering at the Sandlot with a large, cylindrical velvet box. “It’s my brother’s,” she explains as they gather around. She’s holding it gingerly, balancing the bottom on the underside of her forearms and keeping it in place with the faintest touch of her fingertips, trying to disrupt as little of the fabric exterior as possible. Her cautious demeanor adds to the general aura of mystery surrounding the box and its contents. Vivi wonders if the hat inside is just as fancy, whether it’s covered in feathers or beads or something. Hayner wonders why it needs a showy case in the first place, it’s just a freakin’ hat. Pence wonders if it’s really the ark of the covenant, and all of their faces will be melted off when Olette opens it. “Actually, it’s an old hat of his. He’s pretty big on headwear as well.”

“Sounds like you have a lot in common. Maybe you could be friends?” Roxas suggests to Seifer, in that way of his that’s so earnest and unassuming, it would make you suspicious of his motives if you didn’t know any better.

Seifer narrows his eyes. “I’ll decide who I hang out with, punk. Speaking of, you losers have been stinking up my territory long enough. The stench of failure’s going to rub off on me. Let’s see what you’ve brought and then you can scram.”

Having adapted to Seifer’s fits of pretension by now, Olette doesn’t need another cue to continue on, though she grants herself the liberty of rolling her eyes. She slides the lid up and off, before presenting it in front of Seifer to behold. There’s a full ten seconds of silence as everyone takes it in (except for Vivi, who’s too short and tries to jump to see into the box).

Seifer is the first to recover. “I’m starting to think you have it out worse for me than blondie,” he says, staring at Olette with something that could be interpreted as newfound respect. Hayner snarls.

“Hey, lay off her! As if anyone could hate you more than me!”

They appear to be on the verge of getting into another fight—over what exactly?—when Fuu lifts the hat fully out of the box so that it can catch the early morning light. It’s a cowboy hat- made out of leather and chestnut brown, with faint abstract patches where the material had worn away. The crease on the top is deep and soft, the dents on either side giving the crown a tapered appearance. At the base of the crown isn’t a band or any sort of ribbon, but a winding braid a shade darker than the rest of the hat. Fuu turns it over in her hands to inspect every aspect, tracing the stitching all along the brim, which curves upward naturally. Her fingers barely brush against the black satin on the inside, only applying as much pressure as needed to check whether the lining was intact. She directs her gaze over to Olette.

“Nice.”

The tension in Olette’s shoulders immediately dissipates, and she lays the box on the ground by their feet. “It is, isn’t it? My brother doesn’t wear it anymore, but he kept it in good condition. He used to spray it with a leather protector so that it would repel water and wash the sweatband by hand.”

Fuu thrusts the cowboy hat towards Seifer. “Take it.”

He hesitates, but another shake of the hat convinces him to grab it from his friend. Grumbling half-heartedly, he trudges around the corner so that he can swap out his temporary headgear in privacy (today, it’s a navy beret that gets unceremoniously shoved into a pocket). It takes him a couple attempts to work out which side is the front, and even once it’s on his head, he’s uncertain about how he should angle the brim for minimum embarrassment. Seifer finds some solace in the fact that there aren’t any reflective surfaces in this part of the Sandlot. He can remain ignorant about how childish he must appear, at least until he walks out in front of his beloved comrades and mortal enemies and hears the choir of mocking laughter—no, wait, fuck that. He’s Seifer Almasy. He’s the head of the Twilight Town Disciplinary Committee. He can make anything look cool. Otherwise, he can just force everybody to find it cool, and nobody could go against him. He can definitely do that. Totally. With these reaffirming thoughts in mind, Seifer struts back to his adoring audience.

Their reception is rather underwhelming, to put it kindly.

“Something’s… not quite right,” says Hayner, bringing a hand up to his chin and tilting his head in thought.

“Get bent, I look perfect,” Seifer insists, a little too quickly.

“No, I think he’s onto something, y’know?” Rai says, startling everyone with his unexpected shift in alliances. “I dunno what it is, but uhh, uhh—”

They all take pity on his desperate flailing, turning back to Seifer so that they can find the words Rai was searching for. Seifer feels a bit like a slab of meat, or a cow at a county fair, with so many eyes on him. He scowls and folds his arms. Rai’s lucky he’s been such a loyal ally all these years, or else his betrayal would not have gone unnoticed. As it is, this moment of judgment and examination is taking too long already, and Seifer starts tapping his foot in annoyance.

“It’s the shoes!” Pence points at Seifer’s boots as if he’s made a life-changing discovery. “It’s his boots!”

“Don’t cowboy hats and boots go together?” Vivi inquires. He leans over, face almost pressed to the material of Seifer’s shoes. He has always admired Seifer’s sense of style, including Seifer’s black, silver-soled boots. Being so small, Vivi sees quite a bit of them, probably more than the average person. Or maybe what he really likes is the way that Seifer wears his boots. How he’s never afraid to make a lot of noise to announce his arrival, or how he never bothers tying his shoes like everyone else, forgoing the eyelets entirely and choosing to wrap the laces around the outside of the shoes instead. Vivi would imitate him, but his shoes don’t have any laces.

“Not the same,” Fuu shakes her head.

“They’re right! And we can fix this!” Olette pulls Fuu and Seifer in the direction of Tram Common, and, lacking extra limbs with which she could drag the rest of the group along, is forced to jerk her upper body towards the exit as a hint they should follow. “Come on, let’s go!”

“And where are we going?” says Roxas, thankfully voicing the question all of them wanted to ask. Ultimately, he misses the answer when he realizes they’ve left the hat box behind and has to double back for it.

“Shopping, of course! Seifer needs proper boots to match his hat. What he’s wearing right now doesn’t match the cowboy aesthetic at all. And we can also pick up another couple items that will complete his image. I think he needs more denim. Hayner, don’t you have a pair of jeans he can borrow?”

Hayner, who had previously been going along gainfully with the Olette Express, basking in the sight of his petite friend hauling his sworn rival across the pavement using nothing but the enthusiasm of a potential makeover, stops in his tracks. “There’s no way that prick’s getting into my pants.”

“You wish,” sneers Seifer.

“Fine, fine,” Olette breezes over it. “I’m just trying to save expenses, that’s all.”

Twilight Town doesn’t have the largest selection of commercial clothing stores and boutiques (that would be a few train stops away, and one of Olette’s favorite places to go on holiday), but there is a small shoe shop situated by the cistern, and the eight of them occupy just about all of its square footage when they file in. Olette and Pence instantly look at home—Pence forgets about their intended mission and wanders over to the sneaker racks, and Olette lets go of Seifer so that she can raise a hand in greeting to the shopkeeper.

“What can I help you with today?” she asks.

“We need a pair of cowboy boots, preferably one that can match this hat.”

“Hmm, we don’t stock a lot of those, but I’ll see what I can scrounge up.”

She’s right in that they have limited options to consider, not only in designs but in what they can afford. It seems like their grand plan has hit an obstacle in its very first stage, and Olette is trying to mentally work out where she’s willing to compromise, when the shopkeeper says, “Why don’t you try that thrift store up by the station? I don’t know what their current shoe selection is like, but you might be able to find what you’re looking for.”

And so they’re off on another whirlwind of motion, headed uptown. Rai thinks he’s pretty fit, but the Z Team must be putting in some impressive cardio since they dash through Station Heights like it’s nothing, and he’s huffing and puffing by the time they get to the door of the thrift shop. He has to take a breather just inside the entrance, and ends up locating the shoe section not by the store’s signage, but by a burst of excited chatter. Following the noise, he comes across Seifer already wearing a pair of rugged cowboy boots.

“How’s the fit? Too big, too small?” asks Pence. Both he and Olette are kneeling down by Seifer’s feet, examining the shoes’ condition.

“It’s a little tight up front, but nothing I can’t handle,” Seifer replies. Pence mentions a couple of other quality concerns, but none of them can overcome their collective enthusiasm.

“I can’t believe we lucked out!” says Olette. She straightens out and casts her gaze across the rest of the store. “And we can probably get everything else here, too! Ready to get started?”

Olette, for all of her eagerness, is shockingly receptive to Seifer’s tastes in clothing. She collects armfuls of jackets, shirts, and pants that properly subscribe to her vision, but lays them all out in front of him and allows him to select favorites. When he grunts “more blue,” she returns to the racks and carries out a whole spectrum of periwinkle, cerulean, cobalt, ultramarine. She moves so quickly and with such deliberateness that it makes for a stunningly efficient system, even more so after recruiting Hayner, Roxas, and Rai as manpower to ferry items for her. Sometimes, Hayner tosses in a purposefully sabotaging garment just to hear Seifer yell from the other side of the store. But on just as many occasions he screeches to a halt, says about an article, “Ugh, no, he’s gonna hate that,” and throws it back before it ever reaches the judgment pile. Pence and Fuu inspect the accessories wall, but get derailed trying on goofy sunglasses and bandanas for themselves.

For a while, Seifer basks in the center of everyone’s attention, his every preference catered to. Yet even he wearies of the constant exchange of clothing and loses track of what he’s already tried on. Maybe if there were country music blasting in the background, he could embrace the experience as an exhilarating montage, but the inoffensive pop music playing from the speakers just isn’t doing it for him. The first time he snaps at Fuu, Olette cuts in with an “I’m sorry! You must be exhausted. Let’s gather up these things and go.” Along with the boots, they end up paying for two pairs of pants, two jackets, four shirts, a bandana, and a vest, and it’s all at a manageable price due to the miracle of secondhand clothing shops. Before they leave, Olette pushes Seifer into the dressing room one last time, telling him, “You should at least show off your new look! Put on your favorites, it’ll take two seconds.”

Seifer’s beginning to understand that Olette is also one for dramatic reveals, a sentiment he fully appreciates when he steps out from behind the curtain and an audible gasp goes through the room. It’s the good kind of gasp. Sometimes Seifer enjoys the fearful gasp, but the impressed gasp is close to his heart as well. He even poses a bit, ducking his head and lowering the cowboy hat so that only his smirk is visible.

“Wow, Seifer! It’s like you’re a true lawman! You could be the sheriff of Twilight Town!” Vivi exclaims.

A lawman.

As Rai, Fuu, and Vivi crowd in around Seifer to compliment him further, Olette beams and turns to the others. “Our work here is done,” she says.

“Olette, I’m buying you ice cream for a year, that was amazing,” says Hayner.

“I’ll hold you to that!” she laughs.

“I think I need to sleep for a year, after today,” says Roxas.

They leave the thrift store behind and head home. It soon becomes a common sight to see Seifer decked out in full cowboy regalia, leaning against the closest wall, a piece of straw between his teeth. His activities with the Disciplinary Committee multiply, and he’s more dedicated than ever to enforcing order and keeping the streets clean. Pence is waiting for the moment when Seifer actually affixes a gold star to his shirt and tells Hayner, “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us.” He could probably get some great shots of an old-fashioned standoff between them, if he frames them right.

Pence’s planning is all for naught, however. They happen to be present when the cowboy hat goes out of favor. Hayner and Seifer are arguing about whether it’s a misdemeanor to cross the tram tracks when the vehicle in question is twenty meters away (“You’re interfering with the tram’s schedule, you varmint!” “Maybe if you got off your high horse, you could see that it was nowhere near me!”) when an elderly man hobbles by. Upon spotting Seifer, with his leather hat, boots, and bandana, he chuckles and says to himself, “I liked to play dress-up when I was a boy, too.” He’s so lost in his reminiscing that he doesn’t notice how Seifer’s face drops- first, his expression goes blank, and then his eyebrows draw low and together. A snarl rips at the corner of his mouth, before he remembers who he’s directing his anger at. He tears away, trying to control his breathing, unable to look at anyone around him. “We’ll finish this next time, lamer!” he snaps, as he makes for an exit, any exit. They never do.

Later that week, Fuu and Rai approach Olette while she’s in line for ice cream, velvet box in hand. Fuu passes it over to Olette, who now has to juggle four frozen treats and one of her brother’s prized possessions, as Rai says, “Seifer says thanks for the hat, but it doesn’t really fit the image he wants to present to the world, y’know?”

“Oh, I see,” says Olette, somewhat more preoccupied with keeping her balance than with Seifer’s apparent precarious sense of self as it is determined by the people around him. “And where is he now?”

“Hiding, ‘cuz he doesn’t have anything to wear after gettin’ rid of all his clothes for cowboy costumes—ow, Fuu, what was that for?”

Fuu removes her elbow from Rai’s side. It was a valiant, though ultimately futile, effort to preserve the last of Seifer’s dignity. It’s also extremely rude to call the end result of a person’s makeover labor “cowboy costumes,” especially when they acted with benevolence and sincerity.

“Good effort,” Fuu says to Olette. “Try again.”

“I’m not sure I know what Seifer wants, to be honest. Do you have any suggestions?”

Fuu’s silence speaks louder than her words (then again, that might not be saying much, considering that she’s quiet ninety-five percent of the time).

Olette sighs and shifts the hat box in her arms. “Okay, thanks. I guess it’s back to the drawing board.”

“Group project,” Fuu points out.

“You’re right. Maybe we can come up with something together, or someone else will have a hat in mind.” She smiles. “Guess we’d better put our thinking caps on!”

“I don’t think Seifer would like that kinda hat, y’know?”

If Olette had a free hand, she would have patted Rai on the shoulder. As it is, she just makes sympathetic eye contact with Fuu and departs. This was no time to get down. She has friends, great friends, the best of friends, and there was nothing they couldn’t accomplish together. They’ve thrown together school assignments with fewer resources and inspiration, and have come out with a stellar grade. All they have to do here is find a satisfactory hat. How hard can it be?

--

The fedora was unearthed from the back of Roxas’ closet, and he reckons it was from a childhood theatre production, one of his more ambitious ventures. However, as the four of them stare upon its ominous form lying on the floor of the Usual Spot, they begin to deeply regret rediscovering it in the first place. It radiates an eerie energy that causes the hairs on the back of Pence’s neck to stand up and gooseflesh to break out over Olette’s arms. Roxas is tempted to poke at the hat with a stick, but he fears that it will detonate into a burst of “milady’s” and non-deodorized sweat stains, and it came from his room.

“It was a good idea to gather us all here first before bringing it to Seifer,” says Olette.

“Yeah, there’s no way we could give this to him. It’s too powerful,” says Hayner.

“He’s already on the verge of going to the dark side. This would push him straight over,” adds Pence.

They all take a moment to collectively imagine a Seifer proudly donning this fedora, along with the shroud of thinly concealed misogyny that automatically comes with it. They envision the dark rule that would ensue, how he would adopt a smug sense of superiority somehow more aggravating than the one he presently conveys. A cold wind cuts through the area, and somewhere, an angel loses its wings.

“We should burn it.”

“Yes, let’s.”

--

Incredibly, Seifer can pull off a bucket hat with no problem, an achievement Hayner only previously thought possible by grandmothers and tourists on vacation. The hat in question is a powder blue, with a small trout stitched on the front. The tag is missing from the inside, snipped off by scissors, and there’s a black “D” written in permanent marker by the stub. By now, the ink has been smudged by age, and also because there was a period where the hat spent six days in a freshwater lake, and as a result had to go through the wash multiple times in order to properly clean it and remove the smell.

Hayner knows all this because the abomination is his father’s, his mom cut off the tag because his dad wouldn’t stop complaining about it, and the “D” was added because the hat was originally one of three purchased so that their family would have a matching set. They even posed in a mortifying portrait that Hayner still attempts to destroy to this day, and to distinguish the hats, they labeled each one with their respective owner’s initials. Shortly afterward, they went on vacation to a relative’s lakeside cabin. While on a leisurely tour of the lake on the second morning, a steering issue caused their small craft to capsize, dumping all of its passengers into the water. No one had been injured, thankfully, but in the process all of their hats were lost. Preteen Hayner considered it a victory overall and proceeded to enjoy the rest of the trip, until he noticed something caught in the reeds when they were packing up to leave. Lo and behold, there was his father’s bucket hat. They searched the surrounding area in case the others were nearby, but nothing else washed up, and so his dad dubbed it “the lucky hat” and wears it while fishing in hopes of nailing the big catch. Hayner calls it “the cursed hat,” affectionately.

He doesn’t tell any of this deep lore to Seifer, however. For a moment, he’s tempted to, but it’s not as if he’s donating it because of the sentimental value. He just feels a little guilty that his friends have all contributed so far and he hasn’t, so he grabs the first hat he can find in his house to hand off. Plus, this is Seifer he’s talking about, he doesn’t need to give the man any more ammunition against him.

“It’s about time you put some effort into this, blondie.” Seifer gives it a once-over. “Not bad.”

“You’d better appreciate it,” Hayner says, without elaboration.

“Is that how you give someone a gift? You’d better watch your attitude.”

For a minute Hayner thinks Seifer is going to burn it, or toss it in the trash, if only to be an ass, but Seifer has no issue wearing the bucket hat. It’s a strange sort of cognitive dissonance, spotting the hat from a distance, experiencing the jerk of conditioned recognition, but then feeling it all crumble apart. His dad is taller than that. The person underneath the hat is wearing a long white coat, while his dad usually sticks to striped shirts. Oh right, now he remembers, he gave the cursed hat to Seifer. It’s a whole procedure that Hayner has to complete every time, and he hasn’t gotten used to it. He wonders if Olette felt the same way when she lent out Irvine’s cowboy hat, but it seems silly to ask.

It’s disorienting, because at the same time he’s finding and letting go of the afterimage of his dad in the crowd, he’s also completely lost track of Seifer. Which has never happened before. Knowing where Seifer is at all times is part-defense mechanism, part-opportunity to get one-up on his rival. It’s become second nature at this point, whether it’s filtering out his voice among many, or identifying the splash of blue against white that composes his wardrobe. Even after Seifer’s beanie was ruined, Hayner could always pick him out, no matter the ridiculous headwear. Until now. Now, the powder blue bucket hat hits his eyes first, blooming out everything around it with the assumption of his father’s presence, and his awareness of Seifer comes later.

Hayner feels like it’s a shitty situation from every perspective, but he’s the only one seeing that way. So he should suck it up. It’s just a hat, and he’ll get used to it. Eventually. Maybe.

No sooner has Hayner come to this resolution, this impressive decision of maturity, than his father brings up the possibility of going fishing on the weekend. “It’s been so long! How about it, champ? You, me, your mom, and the lucky hat?”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Hayner thinks. “Uh, maybe? I gotta check, I might be busy, maybe we should go another time,” Hayner says.

Like, next year. Or never.

Hayner runs through a list of solutions to this dilemma in his head. Option one: stealing the bucket hat back from Seifer. Everyone loves a good heist movie, and there would be no higher stakes than this, but how would he pull it off? Would he go the pure stealth route, somehow snatching the hat off of Seifer’s head without him noticing? Or would he summon Pence, Olette, and Roxas, and they could take him in one fell swoop? Both methods had their risks. He’d have to think about it further. Option two: find a replacement bucket hat. Not only would that be logistically impossible—no other hat in existence had gone through what the cursed hat had endured—but the circumstances would so closely parallel what was happening with Seifer that Hayner would rather throw himself off the clocktower first. No, that one was automatically discounted. Option three: …talk to people? Explain the situation to his dad, or Seifer?

Ha, yeah right. Since when has he ever communicated effectively?

What he is stellar at, is complaining to his friends. He finds them hanging around the jobs board in Station Heights, watching Rai grandstand on the street below. The cursed hat and Seifer are missing from action, just the way he needs it. Fuu is there, but whatever, she doesn’t say shit.

“Bad news. I didn’t tell my dad I gave his hat to Seifer.”

“What? He doesn’t know?” Olette says.

“No! And now he’s expecting to wear it on Saturday! He loves that stupid hat! What do I do?”

“Tell him the truth?”

“Already considered, and rejected. Roxas?”

“Uh—”

“Bzzzt, taking too long! Pence?”

“Buy yourself some time and say it needs to be repaired?” Ah, there is that voice of enablement he so desires.

“Perfect. I’m headed back to the Usual Spot. If you see Seifer, or think of anything new and constructive,” he says the last part staring at Olette, “you know where to find me.”

Hayner does his best work in the Usual Spot. There’s something familiar, but not-at-all comfortable about sitting on the boiler and coming up with ideas, and when he detects his brainstorming becoming stagnant, he gets up to pace. The movement feeds into the illusion that he’s making progress. Once or twice Hayner halts, and takes a dramatic step forward as if he can force an epiphany into being, but he can’t surpass the mental roadblock that is “how do I get my dad’s hat back from Seifer.” Overhead, the rumble of distant trains unfurls a blanket of white noise over the space. Normally, this is useful for filtering out distracting chatter, but today it betrays him, masking the arrival of an unwanted guest who pushes past the sheet draped over the entrance and strides in.

He catches a flash of pale blue out of the corner of his eye and instantly his heart rate spikes. Oh shit, his dad is here, his dad found out- wait a minute, that’s Seifer.

Oh shit, that’s Seifer.

When taken by surprise or encountering anything unexpected, Hayner defaults to rudeness.

“What are you doing here, jackass?”

Seifer doesn’t react to his provocation. He looks him dead in the eye.

“Were you ever going to tell me this hat belonged to your dad?”

A sense of denial tends to accompany worst-case scenarios, a way to protect your mind from fully processing just how deep a hole you’re in, and Hayner embraces his. “What makes you think that?”

Seifer rolls his eyes. “Don’t be an idiot. Fuu told me all about it. You’re a real moron for getting yourself in this mess.”

The insults sear straight through Hayner. His entire body burns hot with humiliation. His first reaction is to strike back, to strike anywhere. Fuu, for not being able to keep her damn mouth shut. Seifer, for needing a stupid hat to wear all the time in the first place. He wants to spit the fire out of him and redirect this conversation to safer territory, their usual unproductive exchange of abuses. But underneath all that, there is the painful knowledge that he did screw up. It was his fault for taking his father’s hat without considering the consequences, and then for making such a big deal about covering up his mistake. He wouldn’t be taking it this poorly otherwise.

The truth is a deep, dark pool, and Hayner has to dive in.

“You’re right,” he says, an admission that hurts him less than expected.

Seifer arches an eyebrow.

“Are my ears deceiving me? You’ll have to repeat that, you couldn’t possibly have said—”

“Alright, alright, you don’t have to rub it in,” Hayner groans. He collapses on the sofa. He needs to get comfort somewhere, and Seifer certainly isn’t going to give it to him. “So now what?”

The haughty smile fades from Seifer’s face, and the steely expression from before returns. “I don’t take what isn’t mine,” he says.

Hayner lets out a bark of laughter.

“I’m serious,” Seifer insists. “If your dad cares about it that much, then I don’t deserve to wear it.”

Without further ado, Seifer removes the bucket hat, causing Hayner to reflexively flinch backwards into the couch cushions, his body remembering Seifer’s wrath when he last tried to sneak a peek at Seifer’s unadorned head. But instead of blond hair and whatever dark secret Seifer likes to keep hidden under his hats, there is… a bright red swimming cap. Seifer had come prepared.

Seifer lightly tosses the bucket hat into Hayner’s stunned face, leading to sputtering and a scramble to catch the hat before it hits the ground. It glances off his hands a few times before Hayner gets a firm grip on it, and then he can relax. The material is soft and familiar in his hands. The far-off memory of finding the hat among the shallows and yelling for his father rises up in him, unbidden. He brushes a thumb over the smudged “D,” something constricting in him finally loosening.

“Hey Seifer?”

With his job done and Hayner immersed in his father’s hat, Seifer had intended on making a quiet departure, but Hayner’s voice holds him back.

“Thanks.”

“…Whatever.” Seifer leans toward the gate, as if he’s going to resume his exit, but then thinks better of it. “Just don’t forget you’re still a total failure when it comes to finding me a hat.”

Hayner’s fists clench around the bucket hat. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. I should’ve known you couldn’t find anything good. Look at yourself. You get me a halfway decent hat, and then you take it right back. Of course you can’t follow through on your responsibilities.”

He doesn’t remember getting to his feet, but that’s where Hayner ends up. Blood is rushing through him again. He’s so angry, he’s smiling.

“Oh yeah? Maybe I just haven’t put any effort in, you considered that?”

“Gosh, I hope so lamer. Because I expect more than the trash you and your little pals have dug up recently.”

Seifer walks off, laughing. If he had stayed any longer, Hayner is pretty damn sure he would have said fuck the cursed hat and shoved it down Seifer’s throat. Nostalgia and filial piety have nothing on lifelong grudges. The most he can do now is shout at the back of his mortal enemy shrinking in the distance.

“I’ll show you trash! I’m going to find you the shittiest hat ever, and you’re gonna like it!”

--

Hayner’s declaration reignites the beanie substitute war effort. A myriad of hats come bursting out of the ether, but they seem to be rejected by Seifer just as quickly. Hayner pilfers a chef’s hat from a local café, and Seifer drags both the toque and him back to apologize. “Are cat ears good enough?” Hayner asks, dangling a pair in Seifer’s direction. “No, they’re not!” “What about mouse ears? They came in the same package!” A visor is also assessed as insufficient, which Hayner wants to call bullshit on, there isn’t even anything embarrassing on this one. He sets up a whiteboard in the Usual Spot, recording everything they attempted so far and crossing them off. Alongside to the last two entries, he writes “Surface Area” and circles it five times. Roxas takes pity on the solo struggle and brings in his newsboy cap, which his boss in mail delivery gave to him as a gift, but Seifer takes one look at it and wants to puke. “You are not getting me to wear that stupid black-and-white checkered pattern.” “You’re the stupid one,” is Hayner’s inspired response, which does in fact provide inspiration for his next idea. The dunce cap is clearly homemade, a large sheet of paper taped together in a cone with Hayner’s victorious handwriting on the front, but it only causes more heartbreak in the end when Seifer cackles, “I wouldn’t want you to give up your most prized possession, loser.” Hayner sulks on the couch afterwards, wearing the DIY project and permitting Pence to hold an impromptu photoshoot. “It’s funny, they’re funny,” he says. “I’m the smartest person in this room, perhaps ever, so it’s funny. One day we’ll look back on these pictures and laugh. Heck, I’m laughing right now!” He tips backwards and lets the cap slip over his entire face, noticeably not laughing. “I’ve thought of everything, and nothing has worked! What are we missing?”

--

The baseball cap seems like an intuitive successor for the desecrated beanie, which makes it all the more surprising that it took the group so damn long to think of it, not to mention that it was Rai’s suggestion.

“Aww yeah, you look just like a star athlete, y’know?” Rai crows when Seifer dons the new hat. “Err, not that you aren’t one already!”

Things almost return to normal after that. Actually normal, not the suspended sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, or more accurately, for the current hat to be discarded, that had been perpetuating all previous periods. In fact, things are so normal that Hayner and Seifer are fighting again.

Before all this hat replacement debacle, it wasn’t strange to turn down an alley and see the two engaged in a physical scuffle about something, anything. What the best flavor of ice cream was. Whether the new Struggle advertisements were exciting enough. How long it took to walk from one end of the underground passageway to the other. Perhaps the arguments began on substantial grounds, but without cooler heads of reason to prevail, they rapidly degraded into name-calling and fist-throwing. They never resulted in anything too serious: a black eye here, some scratches there, with the worst outcome being the wounded pride of whoever came out on the bottom that day. Olette figures the fights serve some sort of ritualistic purpose, or maybe they’re a demonstration of masculinity’s belief that physical outcomes take precedence over the marketplace of ideas, and she would consider writing a research paper on them if they didn’t stress her out so much.

Anyway, once the cooperative search for a new hat had ceased, the fights started back up again. Hayner doesn’t quite remember how they reached this point today—it had begun with a mention of a television episode that had aired the previous night, leading into a spirited debate on one-camera versus multicamera sitcoms—but now he’s trying to drive a knee into Seifer’s gut. The effort fails- Seifer pivots just out of the way, lowers his shoulder, and rushes into Hayner while he’s still balancing on one leg. Hayner sees it coming, but can’t react with anything except for alarm, forcing him to take the blow and tumble backwards at the collision. His body skids over the ground, left shoulder and elbow absorbing most of the impact, but he ultimately lands on his knees and pushes off the road to return to his feet.

Seifer’s brawling style isn’t that different from when he’s wielding a Struggle bat- he relishes in landing big hits, and when his enemy is of a more formidable nature, he saves those hits for counterattacks. Then he takes advantage of his opponent’s stunned state to strike again. Hayner knows this, and dives under Seifer’s incoming fist. One upside to fighting Seifer Almasy is that he’s confident, to an utter fault. He’s convinced that if he throws a punch, it’s going to connect, so he should throw with all his might. Thus, it’s only a matter of timing for Hayner to get behind Seifer. As Seifer stumbles past, too much momentum in his swing for him to control, Hayner plants a foot in the square of Seifer’s back and pushes.

The weird thing is, Hayner is pretty sure he’s pulling his punches. Not a whole lot, but maybe on another occasion, he would have swept Seifer’s legs out from underneath him, or tackled Seifer before he even reached him. It’s just- all of these annoying thoughts are occupying his brain. Concerns about whether Rai’s going to make a big fuss about this or if patching up Seifer’s scrapes is going to put Fuu in a sour mood. There’s something else there, too, that has Hayner putting a little less power behind his attacks, but that’s more of a feeling, and he doesn’t have the processing capability nor the luxury to put it into words while clashing with Seifer.

Once Seifer regains his balance and whirls around, Hayner dashes in for another shot. Seifer guards against his right jab to the ribs, but the way he shifts his stance to absorb the lower blow leaves his face wide open. Hayner’s already reeling back, automatically preparing to smash his left fist in, when that ambiguous feeling flows through him. He adjusts the trajectory of his punch so that his knuckles swipe the very edge of Seifer’s cheek instead of hitting him dead on.

It’s the wrong fucking move. Seifer jerks his right hand back, seizes Hayner’s fist as it glances off his face, and squeezes. The sudden, sharp jolt breaks Hayner’s concentration and disrupts his footwork. He nearly crashes into Seifer, except the other boy readjusts his grip, sliding it down to Hayner’s wrist, and twists, twists Hayner’s arm outward, twists it further than it should be allowed to go. Hayner reflexively drops to his knees in a desperate measure to abate the shooting sensations radiating from his wrist. His left arm is a useless appendage, unable to act, only providing him pain and suffering. Tears burn at the corners of his eyes.

And then Seifer lets go. As he releases Hayner’s wrist, he pushes it back with just enough force that Hayner tips over onto his rear end. Hayner hisses, but the agony in his arm is already fading. In a matter of moments, it dies down to a dull ache, only evident when he flexes his fingers to stretch out the relevant muscles. When Hayner looks up, all he sees is Seifer glaring down at him.

“What the hell, Seifer?” It isn’t like grappling is out of the question—there are no fixed rules to their scuffles—but they do it so rarely, Hayner feels a touch taken aback.

“I could say the same to you! What, you think you’re so tough that you don’t need to go all out to beat me? Is that it?”

He wonders if he hit his head sometime during the fight, because Seifer is making absolutely no sense. “What are you talking about?”

Seifer scoffs, though it catches in the back of his throat, a dark and angry sound. “You’re holding back! It makes you sloppy, and I can tell!”

Hayner’s insides are being pulled in all directions. He’s sweating, and it’s not only because of the physical exertion. “Get over yourself! So maybe I don’t want to bash your face in all the time! Isn’t that a good thing for you?”

The stillness that falls upon Seifer is a stark contrast compared to the rage he was previously exuding. While he was all arms and furious gestures a second ago, now his entire body is rigid. Hayner registers the change and a heaviness settles in over the alley, weighing down his limbs, pinning him to the spot. Seifer’s eyes seem to be searching Hayner for an answer he doesn’t know if he can provide. Hayner doesn’t even know the question.

“It depends.”

He doesn’t want to breathe, because breathing would be too loud, breathing would be too much, it might shatter whatever is taking place here, and he needs to find out-

“On what?”

And then Seifer is walking towards him. Hayner blinks as Seifer’s hands grab the front of his shirt and wrench him upward, because his whole field of view is being rapidly enveloped by Seifer’s face, by Seifer’s ocean-blue eyes and the scar that cuts between them, they’re all he can see—

The brim of Seifer’s baseball cap smacks straight into Hayner’s forehead, causing them both to yell in pain. “Fucking shit!” Seifer shouts. He abruptly drops Hayner to the floor so that he can cradle the location where the hat dug back into his forehead, and he staggers away. Hayner barely knows what hit him, and the most he can do is push himself up on his hands and knees, wincing and groaning. His vision had gone white from the impact, but it’s gradually clearing up. He can make out the bricks beneath him, as well as a shadow cast by a neighboring building and Seifer bent over next to it.

“I hate this fucking hat!” Seifer rips off the baseball cap and hurls it on the ground. Hayner instinctively shuts his eyes. He has no clue whether Seifer is wearing a safeguard today, but he doesn’t want to risk it. If he looks now, while Seifer is consumed with pain and anger, he feels like it would be a greater betrayal than before. He focuses on anything else- the throbbing from his forehead, the blood pounding in his ears, the shaky rhythm of his inhales and exhales. Only when all of that dies down does Hayner realize he can’t sense Seifer anymore. Tentatively, he opens an eye and scans his surroundings. He’s all alone. Seifer is gone. The only things left in the alley are him, and the abandoned baseball cap.

--

They don’t bring up what happened that day, and after filing the incident away as “awkward” and “more confusing than math class,” Hayner redirects his energy and emotions into searching for better headwear. In a pitiful, masochistic way, he had missed the frenetic back-and-forth of finding and casting aside new hats. That sentiment vanishes the minute he presents Seifer with a balaclava (“So the only part I have to see of you is your eyes.” “…Don’t you have something that can cover the eyes? So I don’t have to see you at all.”) and he renews his vow to find the one hat to put an end to their trials.

This time, his involvement in procuring a hat doesn’t extend much further than sparking old memories and paying compliments where they’re due. One Halloween some years ago, the quartet went as various incarnations of Sherlock Holmes, but only Olette had held onto her deerstalker cap. “I had forgotten about this, until Hayner said we should go as knock-off Seifers for Halloween, since we have all these extra hats sitting around,” she says. “This has been sitting in my attic, collecting dust.”

“Anything else up there?” asks Roxas.

“No, sorry.”

“This is awesome Olette! You’re a lifesaver! Let’s go give it to him now!” Hayner’s already out the door with it, barely waiting for his friends to catch up.

They complete the easy detective work of tracking down Seifer in the Sandlot and pass off the deerstalker before splitting off to their respective jobs for the day. Some people in this town still entertain aspirations about traveling to the beach and gorging themselves on pretzels, so in the lulls that follow Seifer testing out a new hat, the gang had taken to squeezing in whatever money-making opportunities cropped up. Secretly, Roxas suspects that Seifer might be rejecting all their suggestions as a form of sabotage, but then he tells himself to get a grip, no one cares that much about them going to the beach.

With his skateboard underneath him, he’s speeds through his job of delivering letters and is camped on the sofa at the Usual Spot in no time. Pence and Olette finish shortly after, having teamed up to clear out trash. Unfortunately for Hayner, his task of hauling cargo up the Station Heights hill takes up all morning and the better part of the afternoon. The store’s cart had broken, so instead of transporting everything in two or three trips, he has to carry each box individually to the storage garage. The fat wad of cash he receives at the end works wonders to soothe his sore muscles, however.

Heading back to the Usual Spot, Hayner spies an unusual figure idling by the gate.

“Finally. Took you long enough,” says Seifer as Hayner runs over, straightening up from where he had been lounging against the wall. He hopes the motion comes off as smooth and suave, and doesn’t at all reflect the unease coursing through his veins. It’s the first time the two of them have been alone since he tossed the baseball cap, and his awareness of that on its own is enough for residual embarrassment to rise up in him.

“I was working. You could’ve lent a hand if you were so bored,” says Hayner.

“And deprive you of the opportunity to earn an honest paycheck? I don’t think so.” He snorts at his own jab. “Anyway, I’m here to return the hat.”

“What?! What’s wrong with it this time?”

Seifer sighs, a long, drawn-out thing that gives the impression he has suffered grave hardships. “It makes me look too helpful. Folks keep asking me to solve their problems, and I only have so much time in the day,” he says loftily, though he’s clearly appears unoccupied now. Come to think of it, earlier he implied he had been here for a while. How long has he been waiting for Hayner? “If you give the people too much, they’ll get spoiled.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely spoiling me right now with this conversation,” Hayner deadpans.

“Finally, he gets it,” Seifer proclaims, as if an invisible audience were subject to their exchange.

Hayner laughs under his breath. Some things never change. Like Seifer’s ego.

A small smile spreads across Seifer’s lips, though he twists his mouth to disguise it once he realizes it’s there. “See, that detective stuff is more your schtick. You keep it.”

“Olette is right inside,” Hayner gestures to the Usual Spot. He can hear his friends’ voices from here, although they’re muffled from the sheet and the distance, “It’s her hat, you can—watch it!”

Seifer shoves the deerstalker onto Hayner’s head, pushing the front down so that his vision is completely obscured by the brim. Hayner tries to tug the cap off, but Seifer’s hand on top of it is solid and warm. “Like I said, I’m a busy man,” his voice rumbling from beyond the mass of tweed, “You do it for me.” His hand presses down, rubbing Hayner’s head as if he were giving him a noogie. Or perhaps, tousling his hair.

If Seifer lingers there for a beat longer than necessary, not even he knows.

--

Half past seven on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday morning, Seifer is roused by an incessant pounding on his bedroom door. It pierces through his last vestiges of drowsiness, and when it doesn’t cease Seifer briefly considers murder. Or at least committing grievous harm upon whoever dares to interrupt his sleep. He runs through all the different ways he could mildly inconvenience someone’s life—pushing them off the tram, destroying them in a Struggle match, calling them “an irredeemable waste of space”—as he pulls himself out of bed, trips over his blankets, and retrieves the closest article of headwear his lethargic fingers could locate on the ground, before stumbling over to the door.

When he remembers how doorknobs work and swings his door open, Hayner is waiting on the other side.

“Heya, Seifer. Sweet bonnet.”

Seifer is torn between revising his standards of morality to indeed include murder as a suitable punishment for waking him up too early, and acting like a normal human being.

“…The hell are you doing here, chicken-wuss? Who let you in?”

“Your mom did. She also wants to know when my parents are coming over to play bocce again. I told her things are kind of busy, but she should call them up next week.”

Seifer simply can’t process that much information in his current state. Nor can he understand how Hayner is so chipper at this ungodly hour. Sure, Seifer intermittently rises with the sun to get in a workout, a jog around town when it’s quiet and empty, but he can only be interpreted as a conscious lifeform once he’s returned to his house and had a cup of coffee. You know those “don’t talk to me or even breathe in my general direction unless I’ve inhaled my bean juice” mugs? Seifer owns about five of those and might be singlehandedly keeping them in business. So, in response to the miniature flood of words cascading over him, Seifer is only capable of blinking and ignoring all of it.

“I’ll say it one more time: what the hell are you doing here?”

Apparently Seifer’s “talks slow and deep so that it comes out as a threat” tactic is less effective when he’s half-asleep, or maybe it’s never worked on Hayner at all, because his unexpected guest doesn’t instantaneously vanish from the vicinity, but instead ducks underneath Seifer’s arm and invites himself into the bedroom. Hayner strolls around as he talks, inspecting Seifer’s poster selection and wrinkling his nose at the shelf of trophies. “It’s Pence’s birthday today and we’re holding a surprise party for him at the Usual Spot. Olette is distracting him. Rai and Roxas are setting up decorations. Fuu and Vivi are getting food. I’m getting you.” He ticks off the assignments on his fingers and turns to Seifer. “Take a break from your hat-related woes and have some cake.”

Seifer leans back against his doorframe and smirks. “What makes you think I’d want to go?”

Hayner stares at him as if Seifer had suddenly announced his retirement from Struggling and was pursuing a profession as a beekeeper in its place. “You’ve been hanging out with us all summer. Last night we watched a documentary on workers that got mercury poisoning while manufacturing hats, and you laughed when Pence complained they died for such ugly fashion. Of course you’re going.”

Grimacing slightly, he mulls it over in his head. Just because he finds insults belittling a situation where people had neither the scientific knowledge nor the historical hindsight to realize their jobs were killing them humorous, doesn’t mean that they’re all buddy-buddy now. Or even buddy. They still owe him for ruining his beanie. That’s the only reason they’ve been spending time together, honestly. It’s not like he’s been seeking any of them out. And besides, so what if Hayner and his puny friends aren’t always a total pain to be around? Seifer’s a humanist. He knows everyone has to have a tolerable aspect of their personality, and since he’s such a benevolent person, there’s a lot he’s capable of putting up with.

Just as Seifer’s considering conceding (but in the most reluctant manner possible, he has a reputation to maintain, he can’t afford to display anything resembling enthusiasm), Hayner takes off the backpack he’s been toting.

“Come on. If it helps, I brought you something just for the occasion.”

He retrieves an object from the outermost pouch, but Seifer can’t discern its identity. Hayner flicks it like a rubber band across the room, and a blur of color bounces harmlessly off his chest before tumbling to the ground and rolling to a stop at his feet. It’s a paper party hat. Teal and red stripes wrap around the exterior, with golden stars scattered on top. The elastic cord at the base twitches.

Seifer stares at the fallen party hat, and something stirs within him. It starts in his gut, jagged and wrenching, and then climbs upward, tearing up his spine, spreading to his limbs, encasing every last inch of him in bitter ice. Each breath is truncated, shredding at his lungs. His legs are rooted to the ground, knees locked in place. If he moves, if he speaks, something will crack. But he’s not afraid of the breaking itself, no, he’s afraid of what will come surging out of him afterwards. The emotions and words only now crystallizing. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, that’s the only thing he can think of, looking upon this silly little hat. Everything has been wrong and he’s been doing everything wrong, and if he continues down this path, all he’ll ever be is wrong. It has to stop.

Hayner is almost out the door by the time he notices that Seifer hasn’t moved. “What gives? Get a move on!” he calls.

“No.”

Seifer’s voice is so low, Hayner nearly misses it.

“What?”

“I said no. I’m not going.”

And just like that, the breaking happens.

“God, I’ve been so fucking stupid,” he says, slowly. “I’ve been playing your shitty games and letting myself be dragged around by you, and taking whatever you gave me, but that was a mistake. And I’m not going to make it again.”

“Have you lost it?” Hayner bursts out. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the hats. I’m talking about the humiliation. I’m talking about you and your friends. I thought there was no harm in going along with it, I might have even thought it was fun, but I was wrong.”

“You’re- you’re the one who told us to get you a new hat, asshole! Don’t blame it on us just because you don’t like them!”

“I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming myself for trusting you with something so important that you obviously couldn’t handle.”

“Do you hear yourself, right now? Stop. Stop, shut up for a second, do you seriously hear what you’re saying?” Hayner shakily exhales. If Seifer had been wearing his usual snarl and condescending demeanor, he would have known what to do. Even screaming, raging is familiar territory, a level of anger to be risen to and outdone. But this cold, restrained fury leaves him stranded. When Hayner yells, his sentences get swallowed up by Seifer’s quiet, and they emerge twisted into forms unrecognizable. The frustration inside him has nowhere to go, unless he wants it redirected back to him, but he can’t hold it back either. He doesn’t understand what can possibly reach Seifer. “I am asking you to go to Pence’s birthday party, because he would like it if you were there. That’s it! That’s all!”

“I’m not going to your stupid party. You can get rid of that kid’s hat, too.”

“Wow, you’re such a fucking— Fine! You don’t have to wear the hat, it was a joke!” Hayner runs his hands through his hair, trying to stave off the rapidly developing headache. He’s barely controlling himself, and he’s beginning to suspect none of this is worth it.

“It was a shitty joke. And I’m not wasting my time on them anymore. I know what I have to do.”

If there’s one thing Hayner’s good at, it’s sticking by his friends. If there’s another thing he’s good at, it’s walking away when there’s nothing else he can do. Both of those feel painfully relevant now. Who is his friend, what he is able to do- Hayner reassesses their answers in an instant.

“I get it.” Not whatever message Seifer is attempting to impart on him, but what those words mean for them, in the future.

“Good. Go and tell Fuu and Rai to get their asses over here if they know what’s best for them.”

“Do it yourself.”

Hayner refuses to give Seifer the satisfaction of having the last say as he storms out, barely resisting the urge to slam the door behind him. This is Pence’s birthday, and he has to remember that it’s Pence’s birthday, and so long as he focuses on the fact that it’s Pence’s birthday, he can suppress that sour taste in his mouth. Today is about Pence, not about jackasses that can’t be considerate if someone else’s happiness depended on it, and should he forget that, then he will become that jackass. He has cutlery, napkins, plates, and noisemakers that he picked up from the store in his backpack, and when the party is in full swing, he’s going to grab one of those noisemakers and blow on it until it breaks.

--

Parties at the Usual Spot are always raucous affairs, and that applies doubly for surprise parties. Witnesses can accurately compare their aftermaths to tornado touchdowns, or rave venues, or the casual Saturday meetings of Setzer’s fanclub. With the additional presence of Rai, Fuu, and Vivi, who had stuck around for a good stretch even after Hayner had announced Seifer’s intended truancy, the disaster zone had only expanded. Eventually, they’ll have to get around to taking down the streamers, recycling the beverage bottles, and putting away the cake (which was mostly demolished, but a few pieces still remain for Pence to savor at home), but those are all chores for later, once some of the euphoria has worn off and the stench of flat, room temperature soda becomes unbearable. For the moment, the four of them have crashed on any available flat surface and have returned to the ever-ongoing brainstorming session of what hats they should find for Seifer.

“I’m running out of ideas,” admits Olette.

“I’m running out of hats,” says Pence.

“What about tin foil hats? Don’t those exist?” says Roxas. “That sounds easy to make.”

“Yeah, but they’re only used by conspiracy theorists. They’re supposed to shield you from government or extraterrestrial mind-reading,” replies Pence, sniffing to indicate his disbelief.

“So we should get one for you?” Roxas teases.

“Hey!” Pence throws his arms up in protest as his friends break into laughter. “I don’t subscribe to conspiracies! All of my theories are backed up by hard evidence!”

“That’s what they all say,” Olette chimes in.

“Not fair guys, it’s my birthday! Though I will say, aliens do—”

“Unless the aliens are bringing us hats, we should move on,” says Olette. “You know what we haven’t tried yet? Helmets.”

Roxas perks up. “Like sports helmets?”

“Don’t pretend like you wear a helmet while skateboarding Roxas, we all know your greatest fear is helmet hair,” says Pence.

He pouts, but doesn’t deny it.

Olette overlooks Roxas’ blatant disregard for safety. “Any kind of helmet, really. It can’t hurt.”

“You know what place seems like it would have helmets? The Old Mansion. There gotta be suits of armor lying around in there.”

“And how are we getting over the locked gate?”

“The power of teamwork?”

They lapse into silence, which is only interrupted by the sporadic thumps of darts hitting the dartboard. At some point in their conversation, Hayner had gotten up to play. Roxas crumples up a ball of discarded wrapping paper and juggles it off his arm like he’s grandstanding, the steady rhythm helping him to think.

An idea strikes him, and he catches the ball in one hand.

“Those baseball helmets with slots for beer cans on the side!”

“You want us to buy Seifer, the head of the Twilight Town Disciplinary Committee, a hat that promotes underage drinking?

“We were talking about helmets! And you don’t have to put beer in there, he could have juice, or water. He could use it to stay hydrated while Struggling!”

“There’s no way that’s allowed in the rule book.”

“No one reads the rule book, Olette.”

Thwunk. Thwunk. Thwunk.

“Wedding veil.”

“Who’s he getting married to?”

“…His Struggle bat. The town. The abstract concept of law and order.”

“As nice as they are, wedding veils are pretty translucent. I don’t think it would work in this case.”

Thwunk. Thwunk. Thwunk.

“Don’t people attach a bunch of fruit on their heads and call it a hat?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it in movies before.”

“Would we be using real fruit or fake fruit? One of those requires more maintenance than the other.”

“Who do you know owns fake fruit?”

“My uncle does, actually. He keeps them in a bowl in his living room and tells us not to touch it.”

“Wait a minute. Consider the benefits of real fruit. When it rots, we can smell him coming!”

Thwunk. Thwunk. Thwunk.

“Can wigs be considered hats?”

THWACK!

The dart is less carefully aimed at the high score areas of the dartboard, and more chucked at it with as much force as can be mustered. Olette jumps at the sudden noise, Roxas’ arm misses the wrapping paper ball, and the trio turns to look at Hayner snatching the dart up from off the floor. All of them had noticed his non-participation in their borderline free-association experiment, but had chosen to let him be, communally understanding it to be the safest option for the time being. Mellowed out more than usual from all the presents and love, Pence finally dares to address the pissed-off teenaged boy in the room.

“What’s eating you? Upset Seifer didn’t come to the party? I’ll get over it, I promise.”

“It’s not that! It’s—” Hayner glowers, gripping the darts so tightly in his right hand that the knuckles turn white, “Why are we doing this for Seifer, anyway? He’s never going to like anything we give him. He’s never going to want anything we give him.”

Olette frowns and leans toward Hayner. “Did he say something to you this morning?”

“No, no! It’s just that he’s an ungrateful ass! We’ve tried so hard to come up with something good, and he’d rather dump them in the trash! Sure, it’s true that we’re the cause of all this, and that we’ve handed him some not-so-great hats recently, but there were a lot of serious efforts too! And I thought—” he can’t finish the sentence at first, the words torn away by his anger, “I thought he was enjoying the goofier hats. I was enjoying the goofier hats! But apparently not!”

The truth is, Hayner hasn’t been able to get the argument with Seifer out of his mind, not even when he was celebrating with his friends. He can’t piece together what the connection is between the hats they selected, the party hat in particular, and Seifer’s scorn. He can’t reconcile the easy, if uneven at times, camaraderie that had united all eight of them in the weeks before now, and Seifer’s utter rejection of their relationship. And he can’t push away the hurt that this was how Seifer actually saw him, as an annoyance, as a waste, and only now it was coming to light.

He slams the darts against the wall. “I just don’t get him! What’s the big deal about his stupid hat?”

“Hayner, I need to tell you something.”

Hayner jerks his head to look over at Roxas, whose hands are folded tightly in his lap and eyes are staring intently at him. Roxas is always someone to be listened to, unlike Pence when he digresses on a science fiction tangent, or Olette when she’s reminding him of the homework he purposefully didn’t do, but there are occasions when it is absolutely essential to pay attention to his best friend. Most of those occasions have to do Hayner’s moods above anything else. The depth of Roxas’ empathy and reason extend further than Hayner what can often access on his own, and that’s on a good day. So when Hayner is the angriest, when he wants to do nothing more than break down the doors of the nearest person that wronged him, that’s precisely when he has to listen to Roxas.

“I guess I didn’t say anything before because I also thought we were doing it for fun, and it wasn’t my place to tell you. But I should have. Then maybe this could have been avoided.” He pauses, and Hayner nods for him to continue. “Back at the start of all this, Vivi and I went shopping together. That’s when he bought that top hat. And he told me why Seifer values that beanie so much. It was from his grandmother. And she’s not around anymore, so it’s not like she can replace it.”

The blood drains from Hayner’s face. The phrase “something so important” echoes in his ears. No wonder Seifer can’t trust him. To hold something so precious in your palms, and then to shatter it, even unknowingly, is a grievous fault. And to think he tried to substitute it with what? A chef’s hat and a handmade dunce cap? Another pang strikes his heart when he recalls Seifer’s kindness in returning his father’s bucket hat. His family had gone fishing as planned, and Hayner hadn’t realized how much he cared for that ugly hat and his dad’s wide smile underneath it until they were at risk of being lost. Seifer could have kept that hat, he was entirely in the right to, but instead he had given it back to the person who had ruined everything. Oh shit, he had really blown it.

“I, I can— I can’t fix this,” Hayner says with dawning realization. “But I have an idea.”

--

Seifer doesn’t bother explaining to Rai, Fuu, and Vivi why they’re not allowed to hang out with Hayner and his gang anymore; he simply forces them to direct their energies elsewhere. His announcement that they had to start training more, that they had gotten soft and weak and needed to get back on track, is met with an enthusiastic reception. Rai cheers, “That’s the Seifer I know, y’know!”, Fuu nods and is already in a sparring stance, and Vivi is just delighted to be included. Their workouts are more punishing than ever. Seifer wakes up early to run, lifts weights until his muscles feel like jelly, and then he fights Rai and Fuu, often at the same time. Occasionally he’ll impose limitations on himself, tying a hand behind his back, throwing aside his weapon, or covering his eyes with a blindfold. He has to be prepared for anything, he tells himself. Nothing can hold him back.

Whether it’s because of his new exercise schedule keeping him away or because they’ve given up on the futile endeavor, Seifer no longer receives new hats from the town losers. When he concludes that Hayner probably whined all about why he didn’t go to that asinine party and turned them against him, he snorts. Good, having them around, forcing stupid hats upon him, would only be a nuisance. The only problem is, he hasn’t held onto most of the hats he experimented with, either returning them to their original owners or leaving them behind to be disposed of. Ironically, Seifer settles on tying the bandana he bought from the thrift shop around his head and calling that sufficient. Perhaps not all of his experiences this summer were totally useless.

His abandonment of the hat replacement project is why Seifer fails to notice Hayner’s absence for a few days. Usually, Hayner’s presence is forced upon him, by his grating voice when he’s yelling to his friends in the Back Alley, by his body when he forces himself into the same crowded tram car just to antagonize him, by half of a popsicle falling from the clocktower, so Seifer has conditioned himself to be ready to put the lamer in his place at all times. If Seifer knows where Hayner is at all times, that’s one step closer to humiliating him (at least, that’s how it used to be). And no trace of Hayner must mean that he and his friends were actively avoiding him. It’s a logical assumption, except Seifer bumps into Pence at the shoe store when he’s buying new sneakers. And then he spots Roxas patronizing the candy store, and they even make eye contact when he passes by. Olette hands him a flier for an author talk at the library as he exits the train station. He keeps seeing them, over and over as it is customary when you inhabit the same town with a static population, but suspiciously without Hayner.

It’s not like he can just ask them where Hayner is, because there’s no way they would believe the question is coming from the goodness of his heart. Heck, he doesn’t even buy into that. But the absence of Hayner nags at him, whispers, “this could be your fault,” and he wants it to clam up. It’s interfering with his training progress and he can’t focus. Hence, Seifer stops two out of four of the geek squad on their way back from picking up ice cream, and says, “I haven’t seen blondie lately. I know he’s up to no good, and you’d better tell me what it is.” Pence does a horrific job of lying to him, his voice all high-pitched and his eyes darting around, and Roxas merely replies, “It’s none of your business,” which only raises his hackles even more.

Every time he encounters Roxas, Pence, or Olette afterwards he asks about Hayner. As they grow more elusive and the guilt within him grows unbearably louder, he drops the pretense of caring about public order or wanting better workouts and just demands to know where Hayner is. He never thought he'd feel this way, but he doesn’t like not knowing, doesn’t like not being able to see him. He thinks he might be going insane from the paranoia, he can’t fall asleep because he keeps reliving their argument and the cruel things he said in his room, that fucking party hat is still crumpled up in his trash can and he can’t bring himself to empty the bin because it’s the last thing Hayner touched, and if Roxas casually shrugs at him one more time, Seifer swears he’s going to deck him and storm the chicken-wuss’s house himself—

“He’s at the Usual Spot,” says Olette.

Seifer blinks. He’s beyond expecting straight answers from them, so maybe this is some kind of trap, maybe she’s mixing up which “blondie” he means and is talking about Roxas, maybe in his delusional state his brain can no longer recognize acoustic patterns and properly process them as meaningful speech.

“Hayner’s at the Usual Spot,” Olette repeats, “And you should go see him. Right now.”

Seifer takes off.

--

On the several occasions Seifer had stopped by the Usual Spot earlier in the week, the gate had been sealed shut, impervious to even his agitated yanks at the lock, but today the door is wide open. His legs are taking him on the shortest possible route and struggle to adapt to the sharp right curve he has to make on the way in. He clatters off the far wall and pushes off it for a boost, barely winded. The long passage in between gate and red curtain is a liminal space, his last chance to turn his back and resume his uninterrupted life, but that’s not even a consideration anymore. What presses him more is the not knowing. What he needs is relief.

Seifer makes no attempt to mask his desperation as he clamors in, pushing straight through the curtain and skidding to an unwieldy halt. Hayner isn’t on his typical perch on top of the boiler, but when Seifer jerks his head to right, he finds him standing by the wall, in the middle of peeling photos off the brick. Hayner’s eyes are wide and his frame is tense, as if he wasn’t expecting a storm to come sweeping through his hangout, but other than that he seems… normal. Nothing appears horrifically wrong with him, nothing that would justify his absence. At least, nothing on the outside. Seifer is tempted to reach out, tangibly confirm that Hayner is actually here, but his confusion is a tight restraint. They stand there for a minute, staring at each other, separated by their individual uncertainties. Hayner takes a deep breath, relaxes his shoulders, and abandons the photos for a more important duty.

“Seifer,” he begins.

He knows what he has to say. He’s been running through the words ever since he sent Olette to find Seifer, and it’s the only thing that’s been inside of him since he planned all of this in the first place.

“Hear me out. Let me get through this,” he says, knowing there’s a chance he’ll slip up and skip something if he’s disrupted.

Seifer is watching him warily, but he doesn’t protest.

“First, this- this is for you.” Hayner pulls a black lump out of his pocket and stuffs it into Seifer’s hands before he tears away, unable to look at them anymore. Maintaining eye contact with Seifer, when he has all of his attention on you, is more stressful than he anticipated.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for ruining your beanie. I didn’t know how much you treasured it, but that doesn’t make it okay. And I’m sorry I wasn’t serious enough about finding you a replacement. I’m hoping to make it up to you now.”

He rubs his upper lip. That was the easy part. Apologizing was necessary, a way of recognizing the truth. What remains to be said made him feel more exposed, oddly enough.

“I asked Olette to teach me how to knit, so that I could make you a new hat. That’s- that’s what you’re holding. It’s a hat that I knit for you. It took so long because I kept fucking up and having to start over, and I wanted to do it myself so I didn’t want her helping me. Man, I didn’t appreciate how hard it is to knit, you kinda just assume anyone can pick it up, but that- that doesn’t matter.”

Pull it together Hayner. Seifer doesn’t care about how much Olette scolded you for not caring about the basics and wanting to skip straight to what is necessary for knitting a hat, or how you used all of your extra money for the month for yarn and needles. Get to the point.

“I know that it doesn’t compare to what your grandmother made for you, and I’m not trying to replace it. I’m just trying to make up for- why are you laughing?”

Across the room, Seifer had broken into poorly suppressed snorts, almost keeling over. Embarrassment washes over Hayner. “Hey asshole, I know it sucks, but I tried—”

“It’s, it’s not that,” Seifer hiccups, waving Hayner off. “I’m not making fun of your knitting skills. But fuck, how do I say this? My grandma didn’t make my beanie. She didn’t even know how to knit. No, that thing was probably manufactured in a factory somewhere, who knows.”

“…What? But Roxas told me that that Vivi told him—”

“Vivi must have heard wrong. My grandma didn’t make it, but she did give to me. It was a birthday present, from when I was seven. Barely fit me at the time…” Seifer trails off. It’s a story he’s never told anybody, not even Rai and Fuu. He’s kept it close to his chest all this time, not daring to trust someone with knowledge so indelibly essential to his being.

But then again, no one has ever done something like this for him before. Seifer looks down at the handknit beanie, which really does suck from an objective standpoint. Its whole form is misshapen, lumpier on one side than the other. Uneven stitches leave noticeable gaps in some areas while being too tight elsewhere (all the more obvious when made out of black yarn), and there’s an end sticking out by the bottom where it wasn’t cut properly. Seifer takes everything in, all of the mistakes, all of the frustration and reattempts, all of the hours Hayner put into crafting it, and his hands tremble. He fears holding it too close, lest he damage what Hayner has done for him.

Well, it’s time to give something back.

“About Pence’s birthday,” he begins, throwing Hayner for a loop at the sudden transition, “I’m sorry too. I said a lot of garbage. I treated you like shit. I thought that was the right thing to do, what I had to do.”

“I don’t get it,” says Hayner. “You thought you had to skip the party? Or you thought you had to be mean? What does that have to do with this?”

The pieces are present in Seifer’s mind, and the only thing he has to do is tie them together like strings. It’s a surprisingly difficult task, because he’s lived with these preconceptions for so long that they’ve become fundamental to his existence, to how he understands himself and moves in this world. How do you explain the basis for your whole personality? How do you explain the need to breathe? They’re self-evident, and to explain them requires rationalizing them, defending them. And realizing that they could have flaws. That everything you are could be supported on a sinking foundation. But he has to try now, he has to find the words.

“I was going through a rough patch when my grandma gave me my beanie. And when I put it on, she told me “You look so grown-up,” which was all, all I’ve ever wanted to be.” Seifer’s voice is soft, loving, but it catches at the edges. It’s an old memory, worn down by the passage of time but still clinging to the present. “I guess I’ve always associated the beanie, or wearing a hat, with seeming like an adult since then. Like, people wouldn’t take me seriously if I didn’t have a hat on. It fucking- it sounds stupid now, but I was a kid. And that shit sticks with you, you know? I don’t think about it all the time, but it’s always there. It’s why I don’t feel right when I’m not wearing a hat. I flip out.”

“So, Pence’s birthday. When I saw that party hat, I don’t know, I just, I thought- who would see me as a man in that? What about all the other hats I’d been wearing? While I was trying them out and having fun riling you up, was I fucking up my reputation? It was terrible- I mean, I thought it was terrible. That felt like the worst thing in the world to me. And the only way I could make it right was getting rid of everything that could make me seem like a child. That’s what I thought I had to do.”

“Going to a party would make you a child?” Hayner can’t say he can resonate with what Seifer is telling him, or even fully comprehend it, but he’s doing his best to follow what Seifer has spent his whole abiding by.

“Going to a party, hanging out with you, you name it. I was so confused. So I was an asshole and overreacted, taking it out on you. It’s just more evidence that I don’t know what it means to be an adult,” Seifer laughs deprecatingly.

“Why do you want to grow up so quickly, anyway?” Hayner asks.

At this question, Seifer straightens up. “I have big dreams. Things I want to do. People to protect. I’m not gonna stop until I get there, and I can’t do it as a kid.” There’s a far-off look in his eyes, as if he can see that future all too clearly, as if it’s already in his sights and the only thing he would have to do is walk up and take it. It’s the first time Hayner has heard him speak of a world beyond Sandlot scuffles and Struggle trophies, and it evokes a sense of both wonder and despair in him.

“But Seifer… there are things you can only do as a kid, too. You notice how few adults enter the Struggle tournaments? It’s because they’ve got other responsibilities and can’t train like us. There’s other stuff too, like staying up all night playing video games, or getting ice cream after school with your friends. Or running around trying out different hats all summer. You won’t be able to experience the same youth twice,” says Hayner.

He doesn’t understand why it feels so vital for him to get this point across. Maybe because it’s something Hayner personally spends a lot of time thinking about. It’s why he likes teasing his friends about meaningless shit, since who knows how long Pence will have encyclopedic knowledge of alien encounters or how long Roxas will wear those stupid rings, and why he likes complimenting them even more. It’s what drives him to drag them to the clocktower every day, because he knows that the sunsets of fifteen will be different from the sunsets of twenty, and the sunsets of forty, if he even still has the desire to look at the sky then. It’s why he wants to go to the beach so damn badly.

“My dreams are more important than video games or ice cream. I don’t need a youth if it means sacrificing my dreams,” Seifer says.

“I’m not asking you to give up on your dreams! You said you’re not going to let anything stop you, right? You’ll still get there. But becoming an adult… you’re going to have to leave some stuff behind. Some people. And you might not realize that you miss them until it’s too late, and you can’t go back.” He might be projecting a little too much, but that doesn’t make it any less true. “I just don’t want you to live with any regrets, Seifer.”

“And how do I do that?” Seifer asks, with a layer of skepticism on top. Some part of Hayner’s earnestness is reaching him, and the panic of only an hour ago, when Hayner’s location was unknown to him, is still fresh in his body- but fear of change is preventing him from matching that genuineness.

Hayner throws his arms out. “Enjoy the present! Take a different route home from school! Climb a mountain! Help me break into the Old Mansion! Whatever it is, just make the most of this moment. Stop worrying about how others see you. I mean, who cares? What’s important is how you view yourself. And if anyone looks down on you, all you gotta do is prove them wrong. I thought that’s what it meant to be Seifer Almasy!”

So many times over the last couple months Seifer has been certain that there existed some sort of connection between him and Hayner. It’s cropped up at different occasions—after their fight in the alley and before the disastrous baseball hat collision, returning the deerstalker cap, making eye contact when Rai did something particularly brainless, splitting the last pretzel and not telling anyone about it—but after their first mishap, never has Seifer done anything more than savor the moment. And after he blew off the birthday party and shut off his heart, he figured that’s all there ever would be. But as Hayner triumphantly proclaims his name, Seifer feels it again, the sense that the air around him has gone still and that the entire world has been stripped away to just the two of them and the ground beneath their feet.

“Hayner, how do you see me?

The use of his actual name, and not some insult, startles Hayner, but he recovers quickly. “Geez, were you listening to me at all? It doesn’t matter what people think of you.”

“You’re not just any person. Humor me.”

Put on the spot, Hayner fumbles. “You’re… Seifer.”

“Astute observation.”

“Shut up! Do you want to know or not!”

Seifer holds his hands up in surrender.

“You’re Seifer. You’re a jerk. Arrogant. Pompous. Too good at Struggling. You’ve got friends who will do anything for you, but you also look out for them. You look out for all sorts of people, even if they don’t know it. You care about the town, but sometimes you go about it wrong and need to chill out. You can’t always control yourself and let your ego and anger get the best of you, but I guess we’re in the same boat there. You’re someone I love competing with, and nothing gets my heart racing more than a good match. You’re someone that I’ve learned, when we’re not trying to kill each other, I like being around.” Being vulnerable with his emotions, being honest with himself had become easier ever since Seifer returned his father’s bucket hat. He could have never admitted all this before. That was Seifer’s power. Hayner smiles to himself and looks at Seifer. “You’re all sorts of messed up, but I think you’re going to be okay.”

If “you look so grown-up” were the words Seifer wanted to hear as a child, then “I think you’re going to be okay” is what he needs to hear now. He gazes at Hayner and wants to absorb every detail of this moment, how the late afternoon light transforms his hair into goldenrod, how his dark brown eyes are crinkled affectionately at the corners, how there are still traces of black yarn on his clothes from knitting. Maybe this is what Hayner meant by valuing the present, Seifer thinks, and falls further. He clears his throat and opens his mouth.

“My turn. You’re annoying as fuck. I’ve spent the last couple days thinking about nothing but you. You’re someone I always want by my side, because otherwise I’ll go crazy. And you’re someone I want to share all of my secrets with.”

Hands shaking, Seifer reaches up and unties the bandana. The moment the air sweeps through his hair, he has to fight the urge to cover it back up, vividly aware of Hayner’s eyes on him. But he clenches his fists and compels them down, taking deep breaths. He wants to do this, wants to overcome the stares of others and the conditioning he’s created in his own mind, and he doesn’t know a better person to start with.

“How’re you feeling?” Hayner asks after a minute.

“Like I’m gonna puke,” Seifer admits.

“Relax, man. You don’t have to do it all at once. It’s not a competition.”

Seifer wishes he could tell that to his nerves, which are currently screaming and attempting mutiny against the rest of his body. The jolting sensations wreak havoc not only to his head, but also to his upper arms, his chest. The muscles in his hands are practically spasming with the effort to remain still. It’s a miracle he hasn’t lashed out yet, the anger just beneath the surface and easier to access than the fear, but he reminds himself that the only witness here is Hayner, who sees him clearer than anyone else. Seifer forces out a laugh.

“You think I can’t do it?”

He hears Hayner heave a sigh, and then the other teen is right in front of him. Hayner takes Seifer’s right hand in both of his, sliding his fingers underneath Seifer’s to pry his fist open. He grasps Seifer’s palm and lets Seifer squeeze as tightly as he needs, while Hayner rubs soothing circles into the back of Seifer’s hand with his thumb.

“Does this help?”

Seifer nods, the physical stimulus working wonders to distract him. The repetitive movement calms his racing heart, and he can feel his pulse steadying out. With Hayner inches away, he can pick out every amber wave of hair and smell his shampoo, citrusy and bright. How appropriate. He leans over and lays his head on Hayner’s shoulder, closing his eyes and breathing it in.

“I think I’m gonna stay like this for a little longer.”

Seifer feels Hayner’s laughter more than he hears it, the vibrations rumbling through his frame.

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

-

--

--Epilogue--

Thirteen hours is an approximately sufficient amount of sleep for Hayner to recover from his weeklong knit-a-thon. At one o’clock in the afternoon, he spills out of bed, brushes his teeth, and changes clothes. After cooping himself up in the Usual Spot for so many consecutive days, he’s tempted to skip out, take a walk, get some fresh air, but habit more than anything else carries him to the back alley. It’s not like he can ever get sick of the place. Besides, Olette might have congratulatory ice cream, like she promised.

Just as Hayner is nearing the gate, he hears heavy footsteps thudding behind him. Spinning around, he notices Pence emerging from the underground passageway.

“Hayner, there you are! I’ve been looking everywhere for you! You’re not going to believe this! Seifer—”

Hayner doesn’t need another word. He’s already sprinting for the Sandlot.

Before separating yesterday, Seifer had told him that he was going to work on keeping his hat off fulltime, and Hayner just had to be patient. Hayner hadn’t believed that it would happen this quickly, but then again Seifer is capable of unbelievable things. The slope leading from the back alley is steep, with a couple hard turns, and he has to windmill his arms to prevent himself from outright crashing. He skids into the Sandlot amazingly unscathed, and sees a mass of people congregated by the results board, a familiar white coat speaking at its center. As he gets closer, Hayner realizes what is going on.

Seifer Almasy isn’t hatless. He is, in fact, wearing a very distinct black hat. The terrible, lumpy black hat that Hayner made. And he won’t shut up about it.

Unbelievable.

Seifer cuts off whatever he’s saying when he spots Hayner approaching through the crowd. “Well, wouldn’t you know? It’s the man of the hour! I’ve just been telling everyone how nice this beanie you knit for me is.”

Hayner tackles him, sending gasps into the air and spectators scuttling out of the way. Seifer only smirks and takes it in stride, seemingly prepared for this reaction as he drops into a sparring stance and bears the collision head-on. They roll over the ground. Hayner, more interested in obtaining his handmade beanie so that he can immediately burn it than an actual fight, exerts most of his energy wildly grabbing towards Seifer’s head, but Seifer ducks out of reach and focuses on subduing Hayner’s movements. The moment he thinks he has Hayner trapped, however, Hayner slips free.

“Take it off, take it off right now!” Hayner yells.

“And why would I do that blondie? I love it so much!” says Seifer, grinning slyly.

Hayner snarls, and abandons all restraint. He launches himself forward. Grabbing him around his middle, Seifer twists him around and uses the momentum to redirect his back into the ground. Anticipating Hayner’s retaliatory kicks, Seifer shifts his weight so that he’s just about sitting on Hayner’s legs, and he holds Hayner down. Hayner flails, shoving at the arms pinning him in place, but Seifer has been doing an unnatural amount of lifting this past week while avoiding his personal problems, and can’t be budged. Finally, Hayner gives up, flopping limply on the bricks and panting.

“You jerk, you knew this would happen!” he says.

Seifer leans in. “I’m just following your advice. I’ve gotta enjoy the present, right? Do things I can only do now? How much longer will I be able to wrestle with my boyfriend, while wearing something he made especially for me?”

At the end of his speech, his voice slips into a tone a little less mocking, and his eyes grow soft and tender. The sheer nerve of this man, Hayner thinks. The utter audacity. Seifer’s just lucky that this is how Hayner wants to spend his adolescence too, with silly hats, meaningless brawls, and an overconfident partner with the ocean in his eyes.

“Oh, fuck you,” Hayner responds, and kisses him.