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Two figures tear through the landscape, hazy and bright and burning. It is impossible to tell who leads and who follows. Attached together by the hands, moving smoothly as a unit. One dark haired figure, one blonde, unflustered, despite the speed of their movement and the heat of their surroundings. They'd had practice, you see, at getting out of these scrapes. Almost had it down to a system. Efficient.
"You came!" pants one figure.
"I'll always have your back!" comes the breathless response.
"But you were late!"
"I'm never late! I was exactly on time, now shut up and run."
An explosion sounds dully in the distance. The firecrackers set more dry grass ablaze. Everyone would know who to blame for the damage, but the blame meant nothing if they were never caught. Right?
Neither have quite managed to grasp yet that such a petty problem as "lack of proof" wasn't about to stop anyone from making their lives miserable. Or was it that their lives were already so miserable that one more punishment was simply irrelevant, fading into the backdrop that continues to plague them by the day?
And how many lifetimes had it been now? How many faces, and bodies, since those figures had existed? The memories never came easy these days, one event fading into another, one figure fading into the other. Who had he been, in those days? He couldn't say.
The details, hazy as the smoke they had left in their wake, were never the point after all. He would not mourn for not knowing. He didn't think he was the type for it anyway.
He would not mourn and he would not grieve, he tells himself, as he sits alone in the darkness, the emptiness, thoughts slipping towards a million different people he could have been. A million different ways they could have lived. A million different times she could have came. A million different times she didn't.
Make that a million and one.
Time had been, they could barely tell one from the other. Who was getting them into trouble, who was getting them out? If two bodies had ever shared a mind, they would have thought they were it.
Barely remembered, the naïvety of it disgusted him. "Liar!" He spits the word out at himself, or at her, or at anyone at all, he can't ever be sure. It echoes back at him, bouncing off the nothingness in defiance of all proper physics.
Sometimes, swept up in the haze of burnt and faded memories, he closes his eyes and he hears her. The sound of her footsteps, the sound of her heartbeats, the sound of her thoughts, unmistakable in his mind. And the words are on the tip of his tongue.
"You came," he finds himself whispering. The sound of his own voice cracks whatever spell he's fallen under, and he's alone again.
She never did have his back.
Did she?