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In some ways, Shadow and Silver couldn’t have been more different.
Where Shadow was quiet and reserved, Silver was chatty and outgoing; where Shadow had a natural inclination to distrust, Silver gave the benefit of the doubt; where Shadow viewed the world with what Silver called “cynical realism”, Silver viewed it with what Shadow called “unbridled hope.”
But then, they couldn’t have been more alike, either: both were determined and unwavering in their beliefs; both put the needs of others before their own; both had come from places of hardship and struggle.
Both of them were displaced from their own time.
Though Shadow had grown up in a world long past, where science was finding its groundings and sprouting a hundred different branches of advancements, and Silver had grown up in a world far yet to come, where advancements hadn’t been enough to prevent societal collapse and everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up, the fact remained that neither were from here, neither belonged in this time.
And when you’re displaced from your own time, the difference between fifty-odd years and hundreds is insignificant, unworthy of mentioning. Nothing was the same now either way, nothing looked like fifty-odd years past and nothing looked like hundreds of years yet to come.
Everything just looked foreign.
“It’s like no matter how much I get used to it here—” Silver had said once, sitting with his legs dangling over the side of a wooden boardwalk, arms folded over the lowest rail “—something always feels…”
“Wrong,” Shadow offered, standing next to Silver and overlooking the sea. “Different.”
“Yeah,” Silver said. He looked down at his hands, and then back up to the setting sun. It wasn’t often that he got to spend time alone with Shadow, and something about the guarded hedgehog had always made Silver feel timid around him, but this—a quiet moment spent together, following a one-off mission that Shadow had asked for Silver’s help on—this felt nice.
“We live far inland back home,” Silver continued, propping his arms up to rest his head in his hands. “I never saw the ocean until I got here.”
There was a moment of silence, as if Shadow were contemplating whether Silver’s statement was worth a response—or, maybe, whether he felt comfortable opening up, too.
“Neither had I,” he finally said, slowly sitting down next to Silver, but not facing him. “For all the years I spent imagining what Earth was like, I could never imagine something so… beautiful.”
“Yeah,” Silver said, and quickly added: “I mean, what Earth used to be like. The first time we were able to grow something after so long of failed tries, I…” Silver hesitated as he felt his eyes begin to burn. As much as he wore his heart on his sleeve, the thought of crying in front of Shadow over something so seemingly silly was embarrassing. “I kinda almost felt like… like…”
“Like you don’t deserve it,” Shadow whispered.
Silver looked at Shadow, then back down, quickly; seeing even the smallest hint of tears in Shadow’s eyes made Silver feel like an intruder.
But Silver moved closer, anyway.
“Like it isn’t yours to enjoy,” Silver said.
Yet, here they were anyway.
Here they were, doing their best to carry out their respective missions—to uphold promises of a better future, a better past, a better now—yet never able to connect to their surroundings deeply enough to feel as if they belonged. And their well-meaning, present-tense friends did what they could to make them feel included, but no one really got it.
No one but each other and their shared loneliness.
But shared loneliness is a powerful and magnetic thing.
Existential talks on boardwalks in summer became walks under fiery foliage in fall and shared blankets in the cold of winter and a sense of hope and reliance that blossomed like the flora in spring, and slowly, the world didn’t feel so undeserved or lonely anymore.
Slowly, the world didn’t feel like it wasn’t theirs to enjoy, no matter how displaced they were—because no matter their differences, no matter the worlds they knew, they had each other.