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Ritsu blinks down at the paper. His eyes ache in protest, the equation he’d been staring down burned into his retinas. He leans back in his chair with a sigh and brings up a hand to rub his face.
He doesn’t check the time because he knows it hasn’t been more than five minutes since he last glanced at the clock—3 am. The beginnings of a migraine pound at his left temple, where they always start. He really should know better than to strain his eyes like this by now.
Three hours, if I were to fall asleep right now, his mind supplies. Tomorrow’s—or rather, today’s—student council meeting will be held in the afternoon, so he has an extra half-hour this morning.
Ritsu doesn’t fall asleep, though. He studies the pattern of paint on the ceiling, the same swirling texture he’s scrutinized night after night for years. His mind wanders, and he thinks about how it isn’t really the same pattern. That paint is ash now, buried somewhere beneath the foundation, or out in the garden fertilizing his mother’s tomatoes. He thinks about how nothing is the same, how nothing has been since he smelled the smoke of his childhood home going up in flames. He thinks about how things stopped being the same long before then, about how it has less to do with the paint on his ceiling and more to do with everything and nothing at all.
The Ship of Theseus, he remembers. That’s what he’d been thinking of with the paint and ash and nothing being the same. Our house is like the Ship of Theseus.
Yeah, right, he thinks. If the Ship of Theseus was burnt to the ground and built back up again in three days by a bottle blonde esper.
The swirls of paint look exactly the same way they have for years.
Tap, tap, tap.
Ritsu jumps, banging his leg against his desk rather painfully. He whirls around, startled, to face his window, where the sudden sharp rapping had come from.
A shock of red hair and blue eyes, piercing even in the dim light, are what greet him. The boy crouching outside of his window like some eldritch peeping Tom bears a familiar, manic smirk. Ritsu’s breath leaves him in a long-suffering sigh, and he levels Shou with the best glare he can muster. Shou only grins wider in response, rapping on his window again.
Ritsu crosses the room and flips the lock, pushing up the window and stepping aside to let his unexpected visitor inside. Shou pushes himself off the windowsill and into the room with his hands, bounding further inside before throwing himself onto Ritsu’s bed. Ritsu shuts the window irritably behind him, turning and leaning against the cool glass as he watches Shou conduct his usual routine of completely ruining Ritsu’s meticulously smoothed sheets. His head begins pounding in earnest.
“People are typically asleep at this hour, you know,” Ritsu gripes. “You could’ve woken me from much-needed rest.”
“But you weren’t asleep, and I didn’t,” Shou reminds him. He shifts around on the mess he’s made of the blankets until he’s laying with his head hanging off the edge of the bed, looking at Ritsu upside-down. Ritsu ignores the way his heart stutters in his chest and rolls his eyes. He immediately regrets it as it agitates the ever-growing migraine and the edges of his vision blur out. “It seems like you’re never sleeping, no matter how late I show up,” Shou adds.
Ritsu blinks down at him. “I was working on math homework.”
“You were staring at the ceiling, actually,” Shou holds up a smug finger, which is pointing at the floor due to his position. Then he sits up and immediately flops back onto the mattress. “Woah, headrush,” Shou snickers, staring up at the aforementioned ceiling. “Anything interesting up there?”
Ritsu squints at him for a moment, fighting sleep deprivation, a migraine, and the urge to strangle Shou, among other things. Eventually, he pushes himself off from where he was leaning on the window, swaying for a moment at the loss of support, and crosses the room to his bed. Shou easily makes room for Ritsu, who lays next to him to study the swirling patterns of the paint as well.
They lay there for what was probably a few minutes before Ritsu breaks the comfortable silence. “I was thinking about Theseus’ Ship.”
He feels Shou turn his head to look at him incredulously. “The sus’ huh? ”
A snort escapes Ritsu against his will. He closes his eyes in exasperation, but the corners of his mouth twitch upwards regardless. “The Ship of Theseus. It’s a sort of famous thought experiment. The Greek hero, Theseus, sailed from Crete back to Athens in this ship, and it was preserved in a museum. Over time, the wood began to rot, so the Athenians replaced the old wood with newer, stronger timber until there was none of the original wood left.
“Basically, a bunch of philosophers started asking if the ship could still even be thought of as the original. The experiment as a whole questions whether an object can still remain fundamentally the same once all of its parts have been replaced.”
Ritsu doesn’t open his eyes, but he can still feel Shou’s gaze on him. He gives him time to mull it over. As much as he tries to hide it behind clumsy mishaps and bad jokes, Ritsu knows Shou has a good brain, and the desire to understand new ideas. It’s one of the main things the two of them have in common.
Ritsu’s lack of sleep has begun to take away his gauge of time, but he thinks a few minutes pass before Shou speaks again.
“Well, I think philosophers ask too many questions. It’s stupid to worry about some old rotting ship. The guy’s name is dumb anyway.”
Ritsu’s eyes blink open in surprise. He turns to look at Shou, incredulous. An argument forms in his mind, ready to start on some spiel about symbolism and thought and how asking questions is the whole point of philosophy, dumbass. The words die on his tongue, though, when he finds Shou still looking at him, lips turned up in a small, mischievous grin, eyes sparkling.
Ritsu stares for a few moments before turning back to the paint on the ceiling. I guess he’s right. It is kind of stupid.
Shou whispers “Thee-soos”
“It’s Theseus.”
“Thee-see-ous”
“Theseus, Shou.”