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The auburn skyline sketches itself as a natural progression toward where the sun meets the end of its day-long journey. Leaves, scattered and marred, crumble beneath consecutive footsteps, equally as fumbled, trying to include themselves in the abrupt movement of the air around them.
The steps come in patterns after one another, each a sole coming into contact with the concrete flooring of the school parking lot. They’re urgent in their rhythms, rampant with a firm commitment to somehow find the edge of their want — to finally stop. But they need to first reach their target, their own untouchable desire, to stop. The end feels far away, fraying at the worn fabric that latches onto his dismantled conscience.
A pool of dread had already settled itself in the space between his mind and his stomach, so, at that point, it should already have counted as an inevitable reaction. It shouldn’t have even been a reaction. He should’ve gotten over it as easily as every other tiny inconvenience that seemed to trail itself into his life without warning. This is something he’s used to, something he’s come to embrace closely, and because of how often it occurs and how often it drags him along with it, it should be looked at as normal.
As he continues to question the motive for such an abrupt change in outcome, the air brings another unwelcome melody to light. Footsteps, different in the way they stumble and quicken spontaneously, sink deeply into his thoughts — he’s been followed. Why someone would follow him, he’s never known; he’s never had to experience being the one that needs to be followed. It was never a common occurrence, unlike his previous thoughts of what was supposed to be called the usual.
But, hey, things change. Why they change, he could never tell you; he’s never been the one to have to experience it. Yet here, on the same pathway he’s been walking on for over five years, he feels that maybe not all that seems to be changing has taken form, because if it did, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself — he prefers to know what’s happening when he’s involved, contrary to popular belief.
The wind picks up, blowing streams of multiple leaves through some misplaced strands of his hair, and he gains speed with it. With his footsteps, the other quickened their pace as well. He doesn’t want to turn around to see who’s followed him — obviously they’re either here to yell, or to express concern. They’re just acting, because they don’t. They never care — why would they if their eyes won’t even lift from where they’re sitting on the screen of their carefully built reputation?
He’s at the gate where the school begins, and he suddenly feels a presence behind him. Without warning, they grab his shoulder, forcing him to spin on his now-fatigued heels and make eye contact with the other’s wide-eyed stare. His brunette-inspired hairstyle — equally disheveled — falls in front of his gaze, interrupting the supposed timespan in which he was deciding what to say now that he had the other’s attention.
"Hey," the other starts, breathing out a wave of exhaustion. "Are you okay?"
Many would ask how many times he’s been asked the repetitive phrase he’s come to expect. To that, he would answer with a general statement of how many times he’s been sat down, patted on the shoulder, and asked to admit the internal spiral that had apparently been exposed to the public eye — too many, and likely more to come.
He raises an eyebrow. "Why do you care?" He sounds tired. But, to be brutally honest, when this day ends, he’ll be over the maximum amount of overjoyed a person can be. Right from the get-go, this day has been the most realistic version of a nervous breakdown, and he can’t wait to self-isolate in what he’d call "luxury" — the better category of being a resident of a larger-than-average household.
The other doesn’t seem to take that answer because his eyebrows furrow. Round two’s circling back faster than what he was anticipating. "I care, because if you were fine, you’d be all high and mighty over every little detail. Your mind was practically non-existent the entire day!"
"Again, you should not care."
"And why shouldn’t I?"
"Because we hate each other!"
The other sighs, bringing his hand up to his hair and running it through the messy locks that hang loosely against the prominent force the wind takes upon them. "This isn’t about that. All I see and care about right now is the human being standing in front of me whose feelings have somehow been affected."
He narrows his eyes. Pity, is that what he’s trying to convey? What kind of person would believe that mockery of sympathy? He still finds it so hard to understand why people would do that; it’s so difficult to imagine how others would think like that. People really do think it’s a nice thing to do, a good thing to enact to help their own ties, while all it does is demean the other’s self-esteem. No one wants them to do that; they just do.
"Like I’m supposed to believe that." What kind of hypocrite thinks he can just waltz into his situation without justifying himself? Sure, he’s seen as the kind, lovable guy with a personality that people tend to envy, but, for all reasons merciful, why did he have to get the broad end of the spectrum?
The other huffs indignantly, all but brushing off the harsh edge of the previous statement. "Could you please just use those brain cells I know you have and listen?"
The wind slows around them to accommodate the anticipated atmosphere. Leaves lay scattered in a dysfunctional mosaic while the other waited for him to answer the question of genuine curiosity — and it is genuine curiosity; it has to be. Leisurely, while also using an unreasonable amount of effort to shove the denial of his reasoning downward, he waits for the other to continue.
Obviously, without knowing otherwise, the boy stands shocked with a dense weight of his own supposed cooperation. He smiles mockingly at the other before crossing his arms over his chest, looking arrogant. "Surprised, Peterson? Or were you actually just not expecting my apparent non-existent brain cells to actually have use?"
This seems to snap the other out of his glassy-eyed stare, and he rolls his eyes. "Oh, I’m sorry for having to assume your level of knowledge based on what I’ve seen. You can use your big words to try and persuade me into thinking that you know more than what’s shown, but I’m also smarter than you think." And with that display of undoubted confidence, most would agree.
The silence drags on for what seems like strenuous minutes, both showing a front of indifference. It’s not until the wind starts to strain itself between the thin lines of tension that someone breaks the silence.
He takes a deep breath, closing his eyes and relaxing his wired shoulders, before he opens them again, looking right back into the other’s own guarded ones. "What’s the date?" He mouths it out like a question against his tongue, like it's on the surface.
The other scoffs. "April, twenty-first. Why?"
"It’s your birthday." He expresses his revelation with a sense of disappointment — whether it be toward himself or the person opposite him, it is beyond what he understands. But realizing his stance at a relative distance, he tries to step an inch closer to where the other stands, his eyes staring into the stilled air. "Am I the only one who knows that?"
The landscape erases itself from the other’s view, trees flaking off into their own shadows, the ground beneath them morphing into a reflective stature. The spacing between the two of them stays rhythmic, consistent in the manner in which it turns from forms to shapes. A memorable feeling embodies itself where it usually displays its familiar nature: purposefully digging into the hole he had buried earlier that day.
He doesn’t like how it spreads, seeping into scarred wounds no one was meant to notice until he had shown it to them. The pattern of this barrier scrapes its presence throughout his chest, nails clawing the insides of his ribcage, while another entity grabs onto its remains and continues the same treatment further upward — the opposite hand grasping onto his stomach and dragging below his knees.
It reaches his eyes. It had never reached his eyes before.
"It isn’t…" His own voice catches in his throat. "I don’t—"
"Who else knows, because the people in there sure as hell don’t?"
He brings a hand up to cover his face, his eyes already avoiding the chance of revealing a lucid confession. "How do you even know? I’ve never told you."
The other sighs, irritation littering the edges of his stubborn wit. He says stubborn because that’s how the other interprets the majority of the time they spend together, and that's never been a lot. He bases most people’s personalities on what they choose to put on their expression — the way their eyes narrow or widen at certain pauses, the way their mouth reacts to a particular message or emotion the opposite actor chooses to convey.
So he chooses to listen until this particular facade decides to slowly lower its walls, its pressure to play the role of protector to its hirer — he’s desperate for a change of pace, looking for an escape of some sort to line the unplanned speech he knows the other can improvise without stuttering in between phrases.
Finally, the hesitant gaze of the other’s eyes met his own shielded one. "Answer the question, Drew. Am I or am I not the only person who knows?"
His knees nearly gave out beneath him. He just needed to take those last steps to make it seem like he was walking away, like he was the coward he was seen as, but he didn't — why didn’t he? A part of him wants this new curiosity of whoever decided to follow him to seem genuine, but it was never genuine before, so why does it affect him to the point where his eyes don’t know where to focus?
He needs to answer this question. He needs this person to back away from his area of expertise because he knows how to handle it himself. He can handle it by himself because he’s done it so many times that he's the only one who’s had to handle something as frequent as his own lifestyle problems.
He needs him to leave because he can’t handle another person disabling another of the compartments he abandons because he can’t handle them by himself anymore.
"You shouldn’t care," he says, finally having a definitive understanding of the flowing constellation that lays on the ground below them. "You don’t care. Stop trying to make me feel like you do."
"I do care!" The other yells, firing a war of attacks on the barrier between them. "You just don’t want to believe that I do."
"Oh, and suddenly you just know my entire thought process?"
Frustration begins to simmer beneath the other’s skin. "Just stop, okay? You don’t need to act like I’m going to judge you on every single thing that comes out of your mouth."
Seeming to realize the tone he chose to accompany his accusation, he tries to restrain whatever emotion that seemed to be leaking out the edge of his voice. Each word came out as a different variation of venom, spat at him like a snake would at its victim — it doesn’t occur to him that maybe a snake with a tongue could bite.
"Look," the other starts, teeth gritting into mold against each other. "If you don’t want to answer, I’m not going to push. But I don’t want you to go home feeling like you can wake up on the same day next year and think that it’ll be the same, because it won’t. People will find out eventually, and you can’t make that fact disappear."
He doesn’t like how intuitive the other is; he's self-assured in his theory with a small amount spilling over the edge to prove his statement clear. Proximity also becomes a conscious thought in his mind, his eyes darting in consecutive patterns to the cracks in which the tar divides, and he’s beginning to hope this conversation will end soon — it has to end soon, or otherwise the feeling will declare itself without a second hesitation.
If anything, he admires the brunette’s sense of observation, but it still unsettles him to a certain degree. It is the reason — having that preference for observation — why he became an expert in the art of reading people, tainting his fingers with body language rather than the simple social cue, which is, now that he thinks about it, blatantly stupid.
Having the ability to see through others made him feel superior to their own goal, whatever it was, because, with him specifically, people have always had some variation of seeking a benefit from his stance on the popularity spectrum. When it comes from someone who didn’t initially seem intimidating, he feels violated. The other is also verbally stating his facts based on what he’s apparently seen, and that creates a sense of insecurity within his own capabilities.
It’s too many emotions clashing with one another, too many flying targets to focus on, that he isn’t able to manually control it. Today wasn’t meant to turn out the way it did, and he already felt disgust for it. Now he looks at it like an inconvenience, a joke, made for him to laugh at and mock, because he’s already memorised the pity-accompanied gazes, the shaky smiles, the unshed tears that triggered due to guilt that wasn’t even their fault to carry.
Frantically trying to make use of his options, the eyes trained to the floor flick upward to meet the other’s serious disposition. "I don’t want them to care; I never asked them to care. So, yes, they’ll know eventually, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll care—"
"What do you mean they won’t care?" Disbelieving pupils narrowing in their effort to understand. "They’re your friends; of course they’ll care!"
A layer of liquid shadows his eyelashes, drawing attention away from coming up with a plausible answer. Abruptly, he cuts himself off from an answer, bringing both his shaking hands to vigorously swipe at the skin underneath his eyes. Confusion clouds his thoughts, drawing him into a state of panic.
"I don’t want them to care!" It sounds desperate. His walls diminished, his voice faltered halfway through the statement, and he felt shame clawing its way to where the other feeling had made a pathway throughout the first stages. This time, it finds itself externally wrapping a rope around his neck, straining the air, which he had already started to become cautious of, and tightening through each plea that leaves his mouth.
"Why wouldn’t you want them to care?" Determined to find a definitive answer with this now vulnerable source, the arms of the other crossed over his chest, heaving up and down in sync with the sizeable bouts of air his chest is exploiting to keep up with his unplanned interrogation that might get him the answers he needs.
A breath of frustration escapes his throat, eyes looking up toward where the sun had fallen. The wind had claimed him to some extent, occasionally brushing against his fingertips. Leaves, scattered and marred, stay in clutters, moving only when the wind commands them to — crowds of them surround where they stand, none moving to interrupt their path of stance. "Because they’re the only ones that would." The confession leaves his lips as a whisper, barely audible, before the undeniable feeling of dread enters the build in his head.
He winces when the other takes a step back, consulting his words within his own theories. "What do you mean?"
He takes a deep breath, eventually finding no use in walking away — if he wanted to walk away, he should have done so sooner. "I’m not really into big gestures like having a party or even having cake, for that matter." A pause. "I’ve never really had them, actually."
He can feel the way the other’s body collapses in on itself, saddened at his admittance somehow. Because he isn’t looking in the other’s direction, with his head looking off to the side to where his house would come into view, he has to assume it’s out of defeat at finding nothing of what he expected. "Don’t your parents, like, I don’t know, at least get whatever personal chef you have to bake you a cake? Surely there must be something that happens; I mean, it’s your birthday."
He once again looks toward the sky, his eyes swimming with pools of unfulfilled promises that were broken time and time again. "They’re not here."
Confusion edges its way into the other’s expression. "They’re not here?" He repeats the phrase with an undertone of skepticism, his arched eyebrows betraying his true intention of asking. "Where are they, at work?"
"In Japan, actually." He lets out a humourless laugh at his attempt at a joke; the other doesn’t seem to laugh either, it seems. They left a note on the counter the day before; he came home from school and saw it, detailing how long they were going to be gone for and where they were going, and wishing him a happy birthday for the next day.
He finally meets eyes with the other, and he wishes he would’ve taken that chance to walk away.
He stares into the eyes of the person standing opposite, and he sees sadness, sympathy, and a hint of guilt. Guilt is a strange thing, a good reminder of what could’ve happened and what did, and, obviously, according to his own research and general knowledge of common sense, his answer was not what the other had expected. His body language is practically a reflection of his expression: shoulders sagged, hands fallen to sit at either side of his torso — he hates it.
"Drew…"
"Don’t." His own hands clench to form fists at his sides, nails digging into the skin. "Just don’t, okay? I don’t want you to try and sympathize with me, tell me that you get it, because you don’t. And neither will Liam, Henry, or Zoey, because I’m the only one who does."
He doesn’t realize what’s happening until he feels the trail of it sink down below his chin and drop off onto the ground beneath them. It happens again on the other side of his face, leaving a line of evidence for those around to see. He’s crying, with tears leaking off the edges of his defeated expression. He feels relieved, surprisingly, at how much pressure is released off his body. The silence around them is deafening, and he’s grateful for it.
A few minutes pass, sinking into the atmosphere like the way water would absorb into soil. Movement is only shown through the few steps taken toward where he feels the other stop, pausing, before he feels arms wrapping around his body, embracing his own weight to their own.
The next few minutes foreshadowed their joined position to the ground, finding the comfort easier to display when not having to focus on walking across a line of wire. They carry out their feelings while having the shield of the other side protect them, finally getting their chance to relieve the strain of temptation.
The arms that surround him act like a force begging him to, for once, liberate that emotion of being the only person inside his head, controlling that course of thought. He wants to; he knows how much his heart aches for someone else to finally expose this front of action to; and the head buried in his shoulder doesn’t help his hesitation.
The tears continue at a steady pace, some retreating in desperate search of relief while others hold on to the remaining few stages. Through each phase, the other doesn’t cease his reassurances or slow his display of concern while continuing to register his own shattered beliefs. He almost wants to thank the other for shoving down his own questions, but he decides that keeping this level of trust is a more crucial thing than having to think ahead.
A breath is heard before a soft hand is made to come into contact with his back. "God, I am so sorry." He sounds guilty, his hands tightening ever so slightly behind where they sit, cradling his body.
His own instinct for apologizing immediately dims and dies in his throat. Sounding so genuine in what he says in ways that he could never understand creates a division between his thoughts. It wasn’t his responsibility to worry about his feelings, but after this moment ends, he doesn’t know what he’ll be inclined to think.
The trees around then have now lost most of their leaves and their colour, due to the weather that day and the wind in its wake. The ground, somehow still intact, is blanketed with them — cracks beneath their knees filled with the crackling mirth of their now connected detachments.
It’s symbolic, in a way. Possibly, this could be the most effective method of putting back what he had once lost, what he had missed, and what he had cherished. But a nagging feeling in his mind, peaking out above the chaos below, reminds him that it’s only a hug, a small segment of affection, that’s triggered his emotions. It scares him, yes, but it also intrigues him — how else have his emotions been set off, if at all?
But, hey, when was the last time he received a gesture as heartfelt and good-natured as this? Thinking back, he can probably imagine how minimal the casual reciprocal was, and that was probably once a month. So, without having another protesting thought, he finally lets his body melt into it, no longer in the position of awkwardly trying to rally whatever rival feeling he wanted to believe.
The moment ends quicker than he’d like it to. They pull away from each other with a newfound expression on their faces, standing up to their previous positions opposite each other. The barrier that had been built wavers slightly where it stands, the concrete obstruction weakening, before they both breathe out a sigh.
"Look, I know we have our... differences, and I also know that you don’t want to have people care because then it’s starting an entirely new thing, a new relationship that you don’t really want. But it’s nice to have someone who cares about you sometimes, whether or not you need it." It’s all he says before he turns around and walks away, completely at ease with how he left the conversation — maybe he knows that it’s better to leave it as it is rather than try and convince him.
With a smile accompanying his own face, he decides to follow the direction of the wind, spinning on his heel and continuing on the pathway toward his house. The feeling from before had disappeared, replaced by the warmth coursing through his chest. He finds the feeling comforting and relieving, but he still finds himself confused.
But, in retrospect, maybe remaining in that state of not knowing what to expect led him to accept the reality. And wrapping his arms around himself to walk through the door to an empty hallway, he has to agree — he wants to feel comforted again, wants to know the feeling of being held in the space between someone’s arms.
But, somehow, it still feels wrong. It still feels as if someone will be keeping a knife behind his back while they get closer. It’s happened before; why wouldn’t it happen twice? It still unsettles him, striking his nerve in a way he’s all too familiar with, but his senses crave its touch and its all-encompassing protection.
Yet possibly, he could be wrong — he’s never had to experience being the one that needed to be followed.