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He embraced the mid-afternoon breeze as he got onto Wellston’s roof. The staff didn’t bother locking the door anymore despite it being part of the rules for this school. They just knew that some enterprising young students would just figure out the lock anyway. Either that, or they’d get someone with the right power to just blow it up for them. It’d quickly become a safe haven for academic vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, and those running for oppression or those plotting to oppress.
In all those regards, John Doe had been every one of those persons these past few years of school.
School; listen to him talk. It was more like a kennel of lost, battered dogs establishing a pecking order. A veritable daily death-match where children fought to find out who was the fittest, the most powerful person, the person with the chops and the powers to be on top. A viper pit for this uncivilized society’s pretension at education born by blood as well as books, hierarchy through beatings and bruises.
John knew from experience what it was like to be on the outside and on the inside of this system. It tore at him every day, ripping just a bit more at the fabric of his consciousness. Whether you try to fake it, run from it, hide from it, none of that mattered. Even if you were completely innocent, the system would find you and make an example of you. And if you tried to rebel, to revolt against such a vile oppression, you’d find that its poison had long since already seeped into your veins. Even your best intentions couldn’t be so. After all, what good intentions could be born from someone born within this bonfire?
Some people still believed in him capable of being good, of doing the right thing. He almost threw it all away because of the machinations of others, something that neither him, nor his loved ones, nor the perpetrators had truly come to grips with. Now that he was back, he still wore the crown of being Wellston’s King, but he shunned his kingdom. He was feared by those that were supposed to be his ‘subjects’, yet he didn’t want them to fear him anymore. It was as if the world have been placed in stasis while he was away, for better or worse. It gave him newfound guilt, but also relief— he could grow without worry of those merely tip-toeing around him. It wasn’t an idle quest; he truly wanted to cast out that bloody crown that he bore and turn a new leaf. To prove his intentions good, to show that those who believed in him were right.
Above all, he just wanted to justify all the trust that Seraphina had placed in him.
She went to hell and back, from the pits of despair and powerlessness to stop him when he was truly at his most brutal and paranoid.
In his darkest moments, she was his light.
When the world no longer made sense, when the contradictions of his horrendous actions and his good nature— his true nature, he hopes— Seraphina was there to hold him. Until it made sense, until he calmed down, until he could admit that he’d long since destroyed himself.
A hug was all it took to drag him back from the brink of the abyss. A simple act of friendship, a warm embrace to brace him against the cold of his waking horror. Even now the feeling of her holding him as he cried did more than the springtime sun and the warm tiles of the roof ever could. It was simply because without her, this school was dead to him. Hallways of violence that was the veins of a giant cruel beast that stalked him; when she was sent away, it was like someone had brought the sun low and laid bitter gloom upon his life. Without her, none of it was worth it at all. He wouldn’t have blamed her to walk away and stay away from him now; Sera saw firsthand what he was capable of. The damage he was dealt by the government, by the system they lived in he could dealt back onto others tenfold with all the same cruelty. And he did.
But she didn’t care about any of that. Through the violence he dealt in that one final fight she broke through and told him everything would be all right.
Why didn’t she care? How would anything be all right if he was still around? She could live a better life if he just went away, if he just disappeared, if he just never came back and never gave the opportunity for his trauma to dictate his actions ever again. His mind was an open wound— kept sterile under the wraps of false-identity as a cripple only to be peeled open by Arlo and his thuggish regime. Who knows if or when he’d return to his old ways? Or if someone even more dangerous would come along and decide to drag him back to that darkness?
Once again, through all those suppositions he gave to her after returning, she just shrugged and gave him a reassuring smile that she’d be there to stop them.
And he was so happy to hear her promise that he always felt a bit of him want to cry in relief. She was the best thing in his life by far.
But again, what use could he possibly be to her? A lunch buddy, a pal to fool around with during and after their classes? Nothing came to mind because they’d been everything to each other already. A shoulder to cry on, a source of strength, the one that made every struggle worth going through so long as they could see each other again.
Well, if he couldn’t describe what he could possibly mean to her, perhaps he could define what she meant to him.
His light. His warmth. His protector. His touchstone.
And beyond all that she was the closest friend he’d ever had. Even Claire and Adrion weren’t this close to him in their best of times back in the old days. Hell, he’d even fallen asleep on her next to a tree and she’d let him sleep there on her shoulder. He was like half-a-foot taller than her at least, but she waved it off and said that it wasn’t a problem; if he wasn’t going anywhere, she wasn’t going anywhere either. So they’d just sat there next to each other, him sleeping off his early flight and Sera just letting him be there with her.
It was becoming evident that something’d changed between them. Something big.
A week or so ago they were discussing how she got her powers back, and she mentioned that her sister had been indispensable in getting them to return again. John pried into every detail he could get out of her; it was a time where he wasn’t himself and shouldn’t been supporting her, so he didn’t want to miss a thing. The story ebbed and flowed, but there was a part that really struck a chord with him; she said it so idly, ducking her face away so she could take a drink that he almost missed it.
When her sister was putting her under for the procedure, Sera admitted that she wanted her powers back so that she could be there for him.
It wasn’t to get even with Arlo or fight against injustice and all that, it was him. Before anything material or immaterial, she was still thinking of him even when he was being such a monster.
If the memory of her lifesaving embrace warmed him up within this chilling beast’s shambling corpse they called a school, then that nonchalant admission positively made him radiate. For just a moment he was sitting on a cloud; they were the only ones floating above it all, blissfully alone, them leaning on each other against a grand-old tree in perpetuity together.
Hell, just thinking about it right now made him feel that way again.
John knew he didn’t deserve her. But god damnit he wanted to prove himself worthy. Whatever it took he would do it. Even if it meant wearing this stupid title of ‘King’ and using his powers for good, no matter how hard it would be he would do it for her.
That feeling of sincere and unalloyed joy he had when she was around. Her carefree smile, even the unenthused gazes she’d shared with him; that shoulder he could rely on, her bottomless strength against the worst things this hell world threw at them; that little cloud of serenity that they now sat on together in his mind’s eye—
The way his heart fluttered when she was around and he didn’t know why.
His sudden apprehensions he had not knowing if he should hang back on a single word or keep on talking with her for hours on end without stopping.
How he suddenly cared how he looked around her. When he showed off his new hair— a hasty compromise between the gel he used to mimic his father and how he wore his hair free when he dropped that act and embraced his trauma— she only mentioned it in passing the first time. On her second viewing of it, she said she liked it almost as much as when he was free-styling it and when he was gelling it up. So he kept it exactly there, just because she said she liked it the way it was now.
John wanted to be worthy of her praise, her compliments, and everything Sera meant to him because it felt like it was who he truly was now. It wasn’t a dream, an artifice, an act anymore— the way she saw him was the way he truly was supposed to be, and he wanted to be all naturally that to her.
So now he was just waiting here on the roof again. She’d be along soon; John texted her earlier trying to bait her, but Sera was probably on her way anyway. They’d race their way up here, and Sera was usually first because her class was near the top floor and his happened to be on the bottom. After this period they had lunch together, but it just so happened that the teacher cut class early today, so he’d won their little daily race outright.
He still wanted to play their game, though. Even if he’d won already, it was worth just knowing that she’d be here soon with him. To laugh at his unexpected trickery, to haggle on who’d buy the boba teas next time, to sit next to each other as they let time pass them by.
When John heard that creaky roof door finally open and saw her walk through, it was like rain finally breaking a terribly humid and lonely night. Here came his sunshine, and now he could breathe again. “So, you finally made it, huh?” He teased, and the look she made was definitely worth it.