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“Do you ever plan on talking to your parents again?”
The air bites. Dry wind as tepid as slugs whips up sheets of dust across the flat, featureless pseudo-horizon. The city buzzes several miles out, gray buildings standing still as broken statues do in the rain, each distant stonewalled face a stain on the hazy sky.
“What’s it to you?” Roll Cake asks. With a quick breath he downs the rest of his bottled tea and crushes the plastic in his hands with zero hesitation.
“I’m just wondering,” Kiwi replies. Leaning against him with a soft expression, he plucks the trash out of his gloves and slips it into his pocket.
“Well don’t,” Roll Cake spits. Or tries to. He won’t snap at Kiwi, he would never. But wounds suffered in the heat sting twice as bad, and he’s learned to assume everyone has something has to hide under this unrelenting sun.
Kiwi says nothing in return, only taking a deep breath as his eyes trail from the dirt to his lap. These concrete steps will never be comfortable, but he doesn’t mind a few nicks if it means something happens on them.
“Really?” he says more quietly than usual. His voice carries on the soft wind like used sandpaper. “Even after all these years you still don’t wanna talk to them or anything?”
Roll Cake’s lip curls. Just slightly. The sun can’t catch his pupils narrowing because of the dinky little overhang above his door, but Kiwi does despite everything and leans into him just a little bit more. His body takes up the entirety of the steps, so there’s no reason here not to put that to good use.
“No,” he says curtly. Cutting, almost. “I never wanna talk to ‘em again if I can help it, honestly.”
Kiwi doesn’t weigh much on his lap. With a few subtle movements he snugs himself in between his legs despite their similar short statures. It’s the best shelter out here in this steel oasis masquerading as a house, a utilitarian thing that to its owner only existed to sleep and eat in. He didn’t want to love a house, didn’t want to love anything resembling such. Houses were deserts in themselves, deprived little constructs sucked of all joy by the virtue of having to contain a commodified unit, that thing known more commonly as a family. That snaking collective with heads that twisted and snapped and bit whenever it felt like, whenever it needed to, whenever it felt it was danger. Whenever it felt the nest, the brood, its home—was under attack. Whatever that all meant.
Some birds are good at spotting cuckoo eggs.
“Any reason?” he asks with a bit more of a smile returning. His gaze follows back out across the sand to the road in the pinpoint distance, where cars pass by like frying ants. “If I’m being a bit too curious, lemme know—but I’ve never met anyone who refused to talk to their parents.”
Roll Cake raises an eyebrow.
“...You’re kidding, right?”
His tone is sharp.
“...Not really?” Kiwi says with a placating laugh. Nervous just a little bit, but it’s only around him he’d ever worry about anyone. “Granted I don’t know many people...but my folks weren’t that bad. Average, really, great even—but nothing I’d stop talking to them on purpose for.”
Roll Cake sighs, rolling his eyes and flaring his nostrils, and Kiwi breaks into a full laugh watching. It spurts out like a wound festered on the sidewalk from a bad skateboarding accident, absent of the stares and usual bodies that pile up around it. Unless you want to count the piles upon piles of junk littered around the barren landscape.
“H-Hey! What’s that for?!” he blurts.
“S-Sorry!” Kiwi says, covering his mouth. “It’s just hard to take you seriously like this...”
“What’s that mean?!”
He pecks him on the cheek.
“Haha, it just means it’s hard to take your tough guy act seriously. Nothing more.”
With a smile, he plants one more on Roll Cake’s cheek and plops back down into him, snuggling into his stomach and legs despite the grumbling. Curly green hair catches motor residue and rust flakes, but if Kiwi said that wasn’t something he fell in love with him for, he’d be the biggest liar there was.
“...It’s not an act,” Roll Cake mumbles, wrapping his arms around him. Plastic crinkles in his pockets and their shadows stretch out lazily as the sun hangs behind them, but neither catch the arid ambience nor the teeth it cuts itself on. Their tongues aren’t dry, and they never will be.
“You make it seem like such,” Kiwi replies without a hint of hesitation. “I know you.”
“No you don’t,” Roll Cake says as he clenches his arms just the smallest bit. That could kill Kiwi if he wanted it to. ”Nobody does. Not even myself.”
“Haha, and you wanna live like that mister? C’mere, lemme give you another kiss if you wanna behave like that!”
Roll Cake barks and grumbles as Kiwi twists himself in his grip, fighting against a strength that didn’t come from his own body and power. It doesn’t take much to relent, because Kiwi is so skinny that his arms feel like they could snap him in half like an hourglass, a little cheap hourglass with fake plastic sand that would spill out into this self-made dune and disappear.
Kiwi pauses as he gets halfway. Roll Cake’s gloves cave deep into his torso, huge hands pulsing with fat and candy-caned sinew beneath what was supposed to be skin.
Both of their breaths stop as the air wavers, as the wind stills and the cars in the distance seem to pause for a second. For them of all people. There is no one else around this act of sanctimonious half-between discovery, if they even know what they were discovering.
Discovery was for children. It was for finding pennies buried in the sand at the beach and for bugs you found in the woods outside: caterpillars, ladybugs, aphids, or whatever other little creature a little imagination wanted to make up.
...This kind of discovery was an unearthing of a cuckoo idol’s nest.
Roll Cake holds him tighter. Kiwi winces.
He’s barely trying at all. Round pupils constrict into slits for just the barest of seconds, diving into those eyes as red as a piece of freshly dyed bloody cake.
“...R-Roll Cake?” Kiwi stammers.
Silence. He doesn’t look at him. Only the ground, only the sand which reflects the empty sky as much as they are mutually negligent friends to each other. There was a reason for such things to exist, after all.
“Roll Cake?” he asks one more time, tapping him on the head with an uncertain palm, and quickly, he relents. His arms fall and so does his face, his pupils and the rest of him.
But it’s only quietly.
“Hey. Hey,” Kiwi says as he takes a full breath again. Roll Cake’s stare blanks into the thousand-yard kind as his entire body burns with a white shame.
“Roll Cake?”
No answer. He pulls himself away, only to wait for a second and decide to stand up instead.
“H-Hey, what’s gotten into you?” Kiwi blurts.
“...I have to leave,” he replies flatly. It sounds like all of the emotions he’s ever had just died a hundred times over. “I’m sorry.”
“Wh-Wh...Huh? Leave?!”
Roll Cake’s chest falls up up and down in unsteady breaths as his arms twitch and so do his cheeks, if only the smallest bit. His eyes catch a glint of the sun like a bloodstone freshly smashed, bleeding out. Each and every part of him reeks of a sweet, nauseating buttercream anxiety.
“Y-Yeah. I need a moment. I’m sorry.”