Chapter Text
Your home is states away. The last semblance of a meal has been the meager bite of an atrocity you’d never dare to call airplane food. Your indecisiveness towards the local weather’s eventuality has left your toes uncomfortably sweaty beneath the combination of already too small sandals and too thick socks. Your attempts to switch your suitcase from arm to arm in the fears of scoliosis and other spine anomalies have left you frustrated; every time you do try to drag the load with your left arm you lose your footing in an ungraceful lack of coordination. And you have had enough with all these people.
People, people, people, and not a single one of them throughout this drawn out day has been anywhere near a comfort, a ray of sunshine… You already have it up to here with sunshine, as soon as your feet had hit a surface other than the plane’s, from that very moment, you had had your fill of dry, warm summers. The heat had slipped down your throat as a poignantly suffocating dissonance you simply had to expulse from your body. No luck there. Your fingers had curled and uncurled as more sweat had pooled in between your toes, but also every other area that makes you queasy with sore frustration. From the nape of your neck to your wrists and everywhere else you still want to furiously scratch until the discomfort passes.
People had seemed fine enough as long as you had been accompanied by your father, as if they had simply been waiting to single you out to veritably show their despicable side… Then again, you have caught on to the fleeting thought that your father is simply much more cordial and appreciative than you are yourself; you don’t particularly like analyzing this one thought, so you quickly let go whenever it crosses your reasoning’s progression. However, up to that one-sided bone crushing parting hug, everyone really had seemed nice enough. You’re not all that sure if this is a question of perception or the former, a hostility that the world would hold against you, but it only took a few a few steps away from your one family member for the employees working at the security check to completely shove your mood into the plains of ‘truly and wholly sour’.
It’s not even as if you’d actively participated in nourishing this development. Yes, no matter how many times and how strongly your father had warned you not to make any jokes at the security screening; your throat had still itched to let out a comment or two. You couldn’t even conjure up any original, witty options, but letting out something defying as ‘So, you really do check thirteen year olds for bombs and drugs?’ had been terribly tempting. You hadn’t, you’d smiled, all teeth, and had instead wished the last of the employees on your path a good day, secretly sardonically, but that was secretly and you are absolutely positive it shouldn’t weigh into anything. Even had the person returned the pleasantry with an equal ring of fakeness, well that could have built a more solid base for the start of your day. No, there was a distinctive lack of reply, accompanied by a same distinct lack of smile, and instead the returning product had been a dulled and unimpressed gaze. That’s all it had taken, one first person for you to throw your backpack aggressively over one shoulder and to outright fume all the way to your flight’s gate. It takes you about five steps to slink your right arm into the free strap of the backpack, and somehow your innate habits and phobia to keep a straight posture only serve to feed your anger.
From there on out, every person you’d crossed had been hell. Not that you hadn’t morphed your complete appearance into one of bad mood and frustration, but couldn’t that work in your favor in any way? Shouldn’t anyone try to cheer you right back up? Why did every single person to cross you have to actually cross you? The flight attendant who’d given you a hard time when you hadn’t had your identification out and ready; it doesn’t matter how old you get, any lectures directed your way still make you see red. The flight attendants who were chatting and not doing their job to direct passengers to their seats were just as irritating. You know, you shouldn’t let other people’s work ethics affect you this much, you’ve been told, but it manages to anger you to no end. If you aren’t happy doing your job, someone else will be happy to take it; it’s your approach, but it always spills out of you in throes of aggressiveness. But today it’s not only those who aren’t doing their work efficiently who are getting on your very last nerves, it is literally everyone around you. You get your promised window seat, and really that’s great. And a thousand ideas swirl and lift in your mind only from gazing out at the skies and clouds. And the woman besides you is ridiculously wearing too many layers for the plane’s destination, it’s not even as if Washington is anything but warm in the summer time either, yet there she is with her hoodie and her raincoat and… With every breath she takes her elbow brushes against you, she’s taking too much space with how she’s all wrapped up, and every brush of her elbow pokes at the growing hunger in the pits of your stomach: no, all snacks proposed aboard this aircraft aren’t anything but sickening. So you shift away brusquely, and you sigh loudly, and the woman laughs away with the movie that is playing on her screen, completely oblivious.
And you tell yourself this is some form of Chinese torture; you’ve heard they used to drive people insane with only a continuous rhythm of droplets of water. This must be some sort of variation on a theme. Only, not really, because everyone continues grating at your quickly torn and final nerves and this can only be a more aggressive method of torture. So you make sure to slip on a darker mask of anger, if only to give yourself a fighting chance. Nothing gets easier. You’d originally felt nervous at the idea of navigating yourself in an airport you have never been to before; what if you can’t find the luggage claim, what if you end up on the wrong side of the airport, what if you’re in the wrong place and that place is somehow restricted and you get in loads of trouble for your lack of direction? It’s already stopped mattering by the time your plane starts its descent. The need to pass under the radar and to be in the right place doing the right thing at the right moment has completely vanished from all sections of your thoughts. The heat cuts at your throat as soon as you disembark, in a way that has you itching to change your clothes. You can’t switch your clothes and that concept makes you uncomfortable enough that this anxious frustration settles down in your stomach for the rest of the day. Getting lost in the airport is not even a possibility; two, three steps until a counselor has got you pinned to his group.
You can’t tell his age, but he’s got the sort of attitude of someone who is confident enough in his abilities and confident enough in the prospect of; if you try your best everything will turn out great. How you get this from his greeting and smile alone, you don’t care to debate. The only fact you care to state and to acknowledge is that, somehow, this attitude is infuriating. And so you don’t offer your own greeting or smile back. You step into the group darkly, maintaining eye contact but definitely not putting up any air of pleasantness. He says something to you along the lines of, “I heard you liked playing pranks— that dark look isn’t just a distraction while you put something in place to trick us, is it?” Still upbeat, still confident and unwavering, and the extent of how one-dimensional this adult is turning out to be is adding a fragile layer of distress to your impressive array of negative feelings. That’s enough to cut your will to stare him down. You wonder if they have a file about you at the ready, an image they’ve built of you before you even got here, you wonder if everyone else is here to have a good time and you’re the extra who isn’t so secretly the barricaded problem child. A counselor was supposed to pick you up at the airport, you’d known that much, you hadn’t known they’d corner you at your gate, you hadn’t reasoned that they’d be picking up others as well. A wandering look at the few others following his lead cements how out of place you will be. They are younger than you, young enough to be calling the whole ordeal space camp; you’d been corrected a lot when you’d tried using the term for yourself in the past: you can’t call it that anymore, you’re in the second age group, it’s not camp anymore. But you still refer to it as space camp. The other kids seem upbeat as well albeit tired, and so you pull back onto yourself a little more. Even though your anger still keeps gaining ground in your insides, you don’t make a show of any outbursts, you treat the realization and the affirmation that you have to wait for another plane to land, for another person to add themselves to the plane-camp travel, without any complaints. It’s making you angrier, but you take it as it is.
You get angrier when you realize you’re the only one who needs to pass by the luggage claim, when you remember that other parents probably let their kids pack smartly for a week or so away from home. And so you shift awkwardly and with that ever infuriated energy as you watch the luggage drop and monitor the area for your own belongings. It doesn’t really take that long seeing as you had been waiting for another plane anyhow and the carousel had had time to progress without you. Nonetheless, a surprising sigh leaves your lips as you make your way towards your suitcase, the release of air pinches at your diaphragm and it’s only then that you remember holding your breath at all. The exhale brings a moment of clarity to your slow building rage and you’re even able to let your lips quirk upwards when one of the girls in the group tells you she likes your suitcase. You liked the fluorescent green of it as well and somehow remembering that you had belongings you actually liked alongside you hushes your irritation slightly.
This puts you in your current situation, dragging your suitcase behind the group, sweating profusely in the heat of the airport, and withering with the pressing hunger in your gut. You imagine it might get better, but the positive thought reminds you of the counselor at the head of the group and of how positive he seemed to be, even as he pointed you out as someone who doesn’t deserve much range of freedom. You catch yourself before plummeting into anything more paranoid. After food, shower, rest, maybe you can put your metaphorical fighting gloves back on, but for now you decide to retreat in your aggressiveness a bit. It proves to be a nearly impossible task, well, especially when you understand that food, shower, rest is not that near in your future. You’re crammed into one of those van functioning cabs, and the conversation is buzzing lightly and almost pleasantly. You tune it out for most of the trip and keep your mind out of focus. There is an explanation on how different counselors come at different times of the day at the airport, and how they had an organized grid of landings and who gets to pick up who, and how it was simply such a fun task to take up, greeting so many children from far away. It brings a twisted smile to your face, one of bitter mockery, but it’s a nice start. There is more said and exchanged, but mostly what captures your attention is that one girl who actually seemed older than you, the one who’d arrived after you; hallelujah your age group might not be deserted after all... “Oh boy, I am really looking forward to taking a shower,” she tells the man, and you can pick up on her accent, you just can’t really pick up on where she is from, which is frustrating because you know some part of your mind has the possibility to access that information, you know you’d just been at her arrival gate.
It sounds like the lot of you have activities planned as soon as you arrive on site, games to get better acquainted, and then later on a tour, and then a little assignment meeting: who will be the other members of your team, who will you be bunking with, these sorts of details. And food much later. And showers even later. And rest even farther in the future. You can almost sense the way your built-up anger claws at your stomach, whines and demands to grow in dimensions and to catch your entire energy and attention. Instead you lean against the car door, once again reveling in the small comfort of having the window seat, and glance out to the world. The landscape is very akin to one of a desert, but that doesn’t truly hold your interest either. The hues do frame the azure of the sky nicely though, and you get lost in the almost not clouds in the sky and finally tune out the buzzing conversation successfully. You miss the part where it is shared that a very small portion of campers or, students, like you apparently are yourself, arrive by plane. You didn’t get to hear that most parents like to travel with their children.
There is a change in the quality of the driving, and you can tell you are driving up a hill; you weren’t going to peel your eyes away from the skies just to acknowledge this though. That stubbornness is irrelevant as your view of the sky gets veritably obstructed. The building is imposing and impressive, and you weren’t quite expecting anything like it. It seemed stripped out of NASA’s own campus, and you tune into the conversation again. It is one of many buildings here. This is where you sleep and eat and such, this is where you live. The aluminum and eggshell tints and domed structure alone gets your heart to lift. You are the last one to walk through the door; dark blue, with a similar look to any doors you’d push open at school during the year. You’re dragging along your unneeded but completely cherished suitcase. You follow through and into what easily seems to be the main hall. And instead of being quite elevated, your heart constricts as well. Your mind should have been avalanched with new information, should be racing to keep up with the many new faces, to correlate the loud crowd to the very few people you’d crossed outside, people you hadn’t even noticed out there, but there had been, a few secluded families giving their warm goodbyes… You should have been trying to correlate this loudness to the way conversation had only buzzed lightly within the car’s space, how this space offered echoes and echoes and echoes. The volume has a different effect though, and the spot directly below your ears starts to burn and throb. You could have headed for the table of food, the banquet or whatever, seeing as food was the first thing on your wish list, you could have deduced that there was such a thing, you could see the paper plates amidst the sea of people. You can’t.
The only thing that comes to mind is your father’s absence, and you had never really considered homesickness, but maybe that is much more related to you never leaving your house than to your independence. You attempt to retrace your steps and immediately as you spin on your heels, you collide with the girl who was walking at your pace, the girl from your group, the last one arrived via plane. She asks you a question, you can tell by the way her eyebrows quirk, but you can’t read her lips, nor can you hear her. Besides, your suitcase pushes into someone’s leg as you try to go against the flow and so you quickly discard this escape plan. The echoes don’t give your mind any space and instead of striking out the possibility of escape, it quickly seeks out a different direction than the one you had just used for yourself. You rush forward now, easily maneuvering your suitcase in between various pairs of legs and up to the front of your newly arrived group. You’ve already forgotten if mister irritatingly upbeat counselor has given you his name or not. He might just be easy enough to fool for you to find a way out. So your voice rises, as an impressive rivaling force to the area’s crowd, and by the time it’s finished ringing out, you’ve already settled your suitcase next to him.
“Sir? I forgot something in the cab, hold on to my things, I’ll be right back.” It’s a mingle of polite and not so polite, it’s the best and only thing you have to offer before you practically bounce out of your group’s flow and manage to speedily head back to the heavy door you had entered through. You are not so sure what is this sudden rush that has seized you and is pushing you out of this environment’s way, but it’s too strong to ignore. Anyway, the environment is too much to handle and has weakened you to a point where many simple thoughts are enough to infiltrate your system and to knock you into queasiness. The thought of your father, the thought of certain ways others would glance at you, the thought of school, the thought of the heat.
Opening the door to the exterior world has a sort of way to clutch you by the very source of your discomfort and of your dizziness and shake you back up to a standing position. It’s a world of quiet and of warmth, and it’s only once the heat hits you again that you even take notice of the building’s overly powerful air conditioning system. But the intensity of the sun’s shine and of the unsettling summer soundtrack that you can guess just a step away, leaves no place for you to crawl back into the room full of unfamiliar, hostile faces. You have to rub your head slightly when you notice how the concept of hostility had already slipped into your thoughts, but once the door is cleanly shut behind you, you breathe easy once more. This time you do notice a few people outside. There are two girls sitting against the wall of the building, sharing a plate of food, older than you and probably acquaintances of a long time now. There are a lot of various trios of coddling parents and flustered, yet content children. Birdsongs are clearly heard outside and, despite your mood being an indicator for one of those days where you are two inches from yelling your lungs out for the continuous chirping to give you some peace and quiet, you are pleasantly lulled into a sense of ease by these sounds.
You compulsively begin walking, lightly jogging, down and down the hill. And suddenly, the acuteness of summer doesn’t leave you feeling nearly as bad as you had previously, for the entire day really. Instead, your skin seems to be alit with distant memories of the summer, your consciousness helplessly trying to reach these and to make sense of them, if only to verify their legitimacy. Newer and fresher memories are forgotten, you’ve forgotten how you had suspiciously and hurriedly abandoned your things to a person you already very much disliked, and you also have forgotten about this forced week away from home. Instead, your heart is animated with an energy belonging to your childhood days and your eyes open up to a world with enhanced vibrancy.
Everyone outside of the building is calm, imbibed with the same feelings and memories as you, or so your perspective told you so, in contrast to the charged and loud atmosphere inside. So when your trot stops midway down the hill and you glance up ahead to a boy you guessed was here for all the same reasons as everyone else, you couldn’t help but to feel safe in your assumption of the ease of approaching him. And that thought, that drive to approach him is single handedly fed by his gaze. He is holding up a camera, a camera you can only guess is utterly expensive or to which he accords great emotional attachment, if the personalized camera strap is any indication. Your eyebrows furrow at the pattern of red cherries over yellow, wondering where he could have purchased such an eccentric thing. Honestly, it wasn’t that detail that mattered, it was the aim of the camera, it was the detail that he was photographing the sky that truly mattered, it was that the sky spurred on your creativity as well and you immediately saw it as something special when being a trait shared with another person.
It was entirely enough for you to put up a hand and wave to him energetically with a brief greeting of, “Hey there!”
And that just happened to be enough for the newly encountered boy to turn around, lower his camera and present to you a detail even more defining than one of perspective and of creativity.
You found, in an instant, that this is the sole moment of the day where you have been veritably angry. It’s an appropriate sunglasses wearing day, sure, that much you will agree to without missing a single beat. These sunglasses, however, seem just as unique as the camera strap, not to mention his halo of pale hair. They’re aviators, or so you think, but that’s not what gets you going. It’s the way the sun’s rays glint right off the appealing gold rims of the dark things.
You can’t help yourself from pointing a finger his way and, without further explanation, tell the stranger, “Those are Ben Stiller’s shades.” Not a question.
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“But Dad, it’s like, the end of our childhood. The end of an era? Come on, it’s really, really, utterly important.”
You’re fighting a losing war, his eyes have already returned to the morning’s newspaper. You’re having none of it. It just so happens that today is the day a particular item on EBay’s auction will end, it is now a matter of hours. And your cowardice to ask to spend all of your accumulated money as well as the side request to borrow a bit more weeks in advance is now finally hitting you with insurmountable dead weight. The truth is you probably should not have waited for such a lengthy time before requesting this. At the same time, you are confident in your sense of urgency. It’s now or never.
“He keeps bragging and boasting about what he’s gotten me for my thirteenth birthday and, I mean, that is like half a year away. I can’t let him best me. We can’t let him win, Dad!”
Some friendly competitiveness has always appealed to your father, but this time, it’s falling as flatly as your other convincing arguments. You’d woken up as early as him this morning, up with the sun, as he always does, even on such a day as today, a Saturday. You’d successfully beaten him at sneak attacks just an hour or two ago, he had almost jumped out of his skin when he’d realized you were awake as well. You thought that would be a nice base afor asking him to spend copious amounts of money on someone you had not ever met face to face. So far; not quite a success.
“I think it’s the perfect gift, and I only have a little while before it’s gone!”
You’re usually a bit too prideful to resort to begging, besides your father isn’t too keen of it either. But there’s an upset sense of agitation that is rising within you and it seems to be slipping out with every word. You don’t know if you are trying to prove yourself or what. You can tell Dave is sort of intimidated by you half of the time and the other half he’s obsessively fishing for attention. It’s not like you need further approval, yet… Deep inside, you know it would mean a lot if you could get this right.
“I know I complain about him a lot, but he’s really a good friend… My best one.”
Damn it all, you’ve started picking at your nails. And now you can only hope your father is still scrutinizing the news sternly, because speaking with the heart when it’s anything sentimental and melodramatic is significantly scarier for you than doing it when it’s related to aggressive or critical topics.
“I suppose you should show me this thing before I give my final answer.”
Well, he must have seen it, but that’s insignificant now. You don’t look up from the interesting subject of your nails to make sure that this is going as well as you are hoping it is, you basically rush out from your kitchen and take the quickest straightest route to get to your bedroom. You assume he’ll follow, and if he doesn’t, you’ll yell at him to get upstairs (nicely of course).
It’s not quite necessary, as your computer boots up your father enters your room, arms crossed as he watches the images play out on your screen. You ignore the sound Pesterchum booting up, but you do have to stifle some nervous laughter when it’s followed, a few minutes later, by the continuous ringing sound of a chum pestering you. (You don’t have to look to know that it’s Dave.)
“See? I owe him that much for all his time.” Your tone is a bit sardonic, but you’ve been acting too fond of the guy all morning anyway. You fight down the curiosity of opening the chat window, you’re guessing he’s questioning why you’d gotten up at such a surprisingly early time, but for now you stick to opening one of your bookmarks and to glancing back at your father with anticipation.
“Son, I’m not sure you are aware of it, but there are actually many similar models for a tenth of that price.” He sounds distracted as he leans over your shoulder, surely inspecting every word of the description.
“No, you don’t understand. His brother wears these god-awfully lame shades, and he has like the exact replica of them. And he is going to get hunted down once we enter high school, can’t let that happen.”
“And why is a cheaper model inappropriate?” Silence falls quickly after, and you have to remind yourself very thoroughly that you cannot pick your nails in public twice in the same hour as you mull the words over in your mind.
“Well… I might have teased him too hard about it? Like he has a really sore spot about being different or similar to his brother…” You don’t have to glance at your father to guess the berating look he is giving you. You’re starting to be a little too well known for your reputation to exploit people’s weak and sore spots. And the sigh with which he states your name is enough for you to pipe up and to continue defending your purchase. “But that’s ok, I am totally making it up by getting these sweet ones instead. And they are Ben Stiller’s, like, Dave loves his ugly face, and now he’ll feel accepted about liking lame actors too. All thanks to me!” You clear your throat when your convincing turns a bit too sweet sounding for what you are actually saying. More like admitting to giving Dave as hard a time as all your other acquaintances.
You can’t believe it when he pulls his wallet out from his back pocket. You immediately bolt out of your chair and spin the chair around to him. He doesn’t look very pleased, he’s doing that thing where he rubs the bridge of his nose, it usually only happens at the end of a weekday. So you start thanking him with every passing second as he enters the information to place the bid. You catch on to why he looks so exhausted only a little too late.
“We are going to have a serious discussion about the way you treat your friends tonight, is that understood?”
You nod avidly. But your gut feels as if it’s twisting as you absorb the words. It’s becoming quite a frequent topic at home, and with most of your school teachers, but you don’t see yourself as a bully or anything, you don’t really get what the big deal is.
That discussion never happens. The day was more or less going smoothly, talking to your friends, playing a few games online, checking that, yes, you are still the highest bidder. As far as standard goes, this meets the quota. By the time the afternoon deepens and the closing hour for the coveted shades approaches, you’re feeling pretty confident with your gift. There’s no way Dave will be outshining you this time.
You’re sort of thankful that you’re only caught up in discussion with Jade now, you kind of really want to keep a close eye on the gift. And that goes smoothly too.
You refresh a minute prior to the end, and the prize is yours.
So, yes, it does take you some time to realize some asshole out there got ahead of you with the minimal amount they could have outbid you with and that, probably, yes, two or three seconds before the deal was assured. Whoever the asshole is, he’s probably an expert at this sort of shit.
You spend a solid minute wishing you could be the asshole who was an expert at this sort of shit. And you sourly regret not staying in that state of mind a single minute later, when the fact that you are literally inconsolable presses down on your shoulders.
Your father ends up having to build you back up and having to cheer you up too, so you never get that repeat of ‘why it’s not ok to be insensitive to other people’s feelings’. The point still stands that you yourself can get sensitive too, and that you hadn’t seen this hit coming. It doesn’t strike you how right it had felt to purchase those shades until the option had been ripped away from you.
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As far as spending went in the Strider household, Dave didn’t have to and, simply put, didn’t announce whenever he made a purchase or not. In fact, his brother’s credit card information was nicely saved on his browser, and anything he wanted to claim from the online world came to him in a matter of a few clicks. Though that was the case, his brother didn’t have much reason to scold him or to even be irritated with his wordless behavior. The frequency with which the boy spent the money was scarce and the reason why was quite easy to make out. Whenever he bought something, it’s because he really wanted it. And whatever that may be, it was going to be overused.
More often than not, it was the older sibling who had to push the boy out of the house so they could go shopping for necessities. This tended to happen when Dave started wearing the same joke shirt he’d bought online every other day or so.
Dave doesn’t quite manage to sneak up to him, but he’s still taken aback when he feels the younger Strider’s presence behind him. He’d assumed it was to show him something online, and so he automatically opens up a new tab and puts his hands up and away from the keyboard. He’s even more taken aback however when the other mumbles something about a thing or another he wants to buy.
He’s not quick to voice suspicions though, so instead he leans his chin again his fist, scrutinizing the wariness etched into Dave’s traits. He himself had trouble holding back a similar sentiment; what sort of a new odd quirk did the boy have that he absolutely had to alert his brother about? He probably shouldn’t be worried, he knew the kid, his interests were most often harmless and innocent. And though he obviously strived on doing as many things as possible that could go in the same direction as his sole other family member, said member could see that Dave took a liking to things of a more sensible nature. He did pride himself in not questioning the other, god knew he wanted to make a joke or two when he’d bring back home shoeboxes filled with animal carcasses under the pretense of preserving them. And that turned out to be a genuine steady hobby the older Strider obliged himself to live with.
If this turned out to be even weirder and darker, he was thinking maybe they could have a family talk. He wasn’t too fond of those, but he couldn’t let his ‘offspring’ spiral into the wrong direction. The color theme of EBay catches his eye, but he still observes the kid, trying to pinpoint just what was that tension in his face and why it was necessary to this encounter. The website wasn’t super reassuring either, he was mentally preparing himself for some weird request, and he just didn’t know how to tell him no yet. He could tell it wasn’t a popular opinion, but to him, Dave was such a nice person, quiet and compassionate, he had no complaints there. It felt too cruel to refuse a good and nice person.
“Kid, I’m not going to say no, you can stop looking like you’re about to piss yourself.” Straightforward, to the point, just the way he liked it. Despite this, the answer he gets is the shadow of a shallow laugh. Not a good sign.
Dave’s hands pull away from the keyboard, and he realizes after a few heavy moments that his brother isn’t letting up on staring him down. “I was just wondering if I could bid on this, would you be cool with that?”
He glares at the way Dave’s fingers curl around the chair’s armrest, he’s confident that the other takes the cue not to start fidgeting, but he gives him a break regardless, glancing at the screen with the utmost lack of interest he could summon.
He’s positive the look he gives the screen, and then consecutively the one he gives Dave from over his shoulder, must be the most expressive he’s been in years. “Nah, I think Ben Stiller is decent, why would I be against this?” There must have been some huge detail that was slipping right out of his vision. Some big elephant in the room that was only visible to Dave.
“Well I was planning on wearing them, you know?”
“Yes, I know, kid, that’s usually what you would do with shades.” He points at his own pair, his expression reverting to one of complete boredom, despite the way his mind was still uselessly searching for some hint.
A clear indeterminable sound is heard and he only barely has time to look back to understand the way Dave had flicked his fingers against the temples of his own pair of identical shades. He has time to grin before the younger of the two had time to drain all color from his visage. “You know, I won’t believe you if you tell me you’ve outgrown those, ‘cause I’m easily twice your age, and look at me.”
“I know, bro, it’s just, it’s not super cool to do everything your brother does, I… Right?”
The tension was gone now, his brother was proud to know that he had easily exuded the vibe that there was no big deal in this request. The message had been clear and quick, and yet Dave’s constant yet subtle fight for approval was quite vocal within his words.
“Has someone been giving you a hard time?” He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to tone down or tone up the protectiveness emerging now. Truth was, as far as children went, he wasn’t a typical model. Why wouldn’t he be a target at school? It was a hard task to think of him as such though, he still knew him too well, trusted him to be the good kid that he saw. Who would want to harm the good and honest hearted?
“Nah, I think it was probably friendly teasing. But, what if he has a point?”
He recognizes the wariness and defeat in his posture, he recognizes it as the attitude he adopts whenever he had to question him about the friends he had made online. He didn’t exactly have a problem with that, if no one could fill up his good friends slots in the city, he could go looking elsewhere. He did have a problem, however, with people intimidating him, even if it was from far away.
“Well, he doesn’t, kiddo. Drawing inspiration from others is a sign of open-mindedness and wisdom. It doesn’t matter how close to home you get it from.” He tries to set aside the expression of dejection he can only read too well behind the shades that, now that he looked a bit closer, just seemed a bit out of place over his young features. “Though, I’ve got to admit, I think these could suit you nicely.”
He had to turn away from him so that he wouldn’t smile at the obvious way he lit up at the statement.
“Ok, ok, let’s bid now!” The elder Strider had to physically restrain him from taking over the keyboard again, adding yet another new tab to the window he had opened. “We are bidding on this like true winners do, understood? So for now, we can play some game online, or maybe we can like do a collaborative comic, you name it.”
“Does bidding like winners involve just not doing it?” He frowned as he tried to seat himself on the armrest, crossing his arms impatiently.
“Nope, means we wait for the last minute to sweep the prize for ourselves at the lowest price we can get. Don’t worry, I’ve done this enough times to make it work.”
Dave was quiet for a few seconds, toying with random knickknacks set on the work desk. After a while, he tells him, with a slight laugh. “Man, we sound like such assholes.” But later, when the confirmation page for their purchase is displayed, he accepts his brother’s high five with barely contained glee.
------------------
“Wrong. These are mine.”
Something strange happens when his eyes truly set on you. You’re close enough now for the shape of his eyes to be defined, for you to understand when he looks your way, and understand that he must have a habit of letting his eyes fleet from one detail to the next. But for that first moment, something strange happens to your eyes instead, and you have to blink several times to get the strange and unidentifiable color or movement you are picking up on to fade.
“They’re Ben Stiller’s,” you repeat, and you can understand why you would be furious to find the owner of this pair, but you still feel helpless at the rising levels of hostility you are putting out.
He places his hands over his hips and you have the slight urge to laugh at this, but there is something in his presence that holds you back. You wouldn’t say it’s intimidating, but maybe it’s that diaphanous sensation that had swept over your vision when your eyes had first crossed. You’re trying to concentrate on your feelings of fury, you really are, but there is an intrigue that is keeping your emotions sharp and to the point.
“Name the movie.” It was just arrogant enough, just boastful enough for you to know that whoever this was, they had clearly purchased those shades consciously, and had taken away your perfect present for your closest friend.
“Beats me, I’d be ashamed to name any of his god awful films.”
You still had this strange urge to laugh when he gave you a look of disbelief, one that was almost offended. The mixture of finding this person funny as well as being incredibly angry at them was irritating you at quite a rapid pace.
“In any case, they’re mine now, got them fair and square.”
And that was it, game over. You turned on your heel and walked darkly back up the hill, literally fuming even as your mind pictured any options of the comical expressions he might be sporting now. In fact, when you glance back, only seven steps later, he’s staring at you still, camera in hand, and shades so perfectly harmonized to his face. That’s when the hurt mingles into that infuriated energy that had swept over you. Fair and square? He’d stolen those from right beneath your fingers. He’d stolen them from your best friend. Those had been meant for Dave, and seeing them in person, in the real world, only added to that reality.
Your anger was solidly replaced by longing and sorrow, faster than you realized, you remembered the empty space your closer friends would be leaving in your life for the next week. Instead of returning inside the building immediately, you decide to walk once around it. It’s surprisingly long, and by the time you make it back around, the sun is still hitting as intensely, but no one is to be found outside. You think about the weird trick your eyes had played on you earlier, but most of all, you pray you don’t cross paths with that douchebag again.