Work Text:
Riz sits in the cafeteria, his laptop open on a practice answer for his next exam. He’s finished that last exam. Finally finished that exam, they’ve all finished that exam and Riz and his friends now sit in the cafeteria because they don’t have any lessons to go to during exam period but Fabian is now in another one so they’re not going home yet; so they’re all lounging about on a table and doing nothing.
Well, everyone but Adaine and Riz are doing nothing. Adaine is studying the content for her next wizard exam, and Riz is practising his answering format for his rogue one. He’s not getting very far, though. Because Riz can’t thing.
..Wait. Hold on.
Riz can’t thinng.
Fucking- hold on. Give him a moment.
Riz won’t- shit.
Fuck’s sake. Just.. hold on. Fucking hold on. He’s got this.
Riz.
Can’t.
Think.
There we go. Finally. He did it.
Proven himself wrong, that’s what he’s done. He can push through expectations, even ones he’s put on himself. Nice. Good on him.
Riz tries to smile at that, but his face doesn’t want to, so it doesn’t.
Oh well. He doesn’t have to smile, his friends won’t care. They’re too busy cramming or sleeping at the table around him. Riz looks at them all, and his body feels something, probably because they’re his friends and he loves them and they just got out of an exam so it’s probably relief that they’re done with that, now.
Oh, wait.
That’s just a stomach ache.
Maybe. Actually, no. He just feels sick.
Oh. Rude. How dare his body feel sick. Well, he hasn’t eaten today, actually. Maybe that’s it. Eh, he’ll eat later-
Wait. No. Lunch just happened.
Uh, oops.
Well, he has food in his bag. He can get it out now and eat it, he’s still in the cafeteria. Literally no one is, basically, apart from him and his friends and like two kids in the corners. He can eat now, no one is going to tell him off.
But can he be bothered to get his lunch out of his bag?
No, that’s too much thinking. And Riz can’t think.
“Riz?”
He also apparently can’t hear, either, because Gorgug is looking down at him with an expression that reads ‘I’ve been trying to get your attention for the past two minutes and you still haven’t responded.’
Oops.
Riz tries to open his mouth to solve that problem, to respond, but that requires too much thinking too; so he quickly improvises with a weird hum of acknowledgement that his name is Riz and Gorgug is talking to him right now and that Riz does indeed have ears to hear him.
“Hm?”
“You okay?”
“Hm.”
That’s too many ‘hm’s. That’s a Kristen amount of ‘hm’s, which is too many ‘hm’s because Kristen always says ‘hm’ when she’s acknowledging that you’re talking to her but didn’t actually hear you because her brain was distracted, and Riz’s brain isn’t distracted, he’s fine and focused like always, but he can’t really find the energy in his body to move his face so ‘hm’ will have to do until he locates it or pulls it from some other part of his body.
“Right. Okay. Just don’t wanna speak?”
“Hm.”
Definitely too many ‘hm’s.
“Alright. You.. have fun with that.”
Riz gives him a thumbs up, his hands a part of his body that he can move right now, and then the weird aching feeling in his stomach is back and he considers getting his lunch again.
It’s a simple solution to a problem, really. He’s hungry. He has a packed lunch. It is in his bag. His bag is nect- next to him. He can reach into his bag and grab his lunch.
But that’s so much energy.
Is it though?
Yeah. He’s typing right now. Right, he’s typing. He’s typing a practice exam question. What are the words he’s been typing?
Riz goes to look back through them and cannot be bothered to read it.
His stomach hurts.
Well, he should eat lunch, then. But he can’t.
Why can’t he?
Because moving.
What’s up with moving?
Ugh, moving.
He just needs to do it. Three two one go?
That’s so childish though.
Well, that’s the only way he’s going to be able to do it. Three, two, one, go-
Riz’s arms seem to move by themselves to his backpack, unzipping it and grabbing his lunchbox and opening it on the table.
The fruit has all moved around. He hopes it’s not raspberries- oh thank god, grapes and tomatoes. No damp tortillas from squashed fruit. That’s fine.
Unfortunately, now that the lunchbox lid is off, Riz is reminded that food has a smell. Why does food have a smell? He doesn’t want to eat it now. It doesn’t smell bad but it has a smell and that smell is bad.
He isn’t making any sense.
Riz goes back to typing something for a moment and then the little voice in the back of his head– that sounds too parental to be his own but too like himself to be his mom– tells him to eat again.
Three two one go.
Riz opens his lunchbox again and grabs one of the tortilla triangles and opens his mouth and takes a bite. The surprise at being able to open his mouth is then immediately dismissed by the fact that this tastes gross.
It tastes like food.
Which makes sense, he guesses. It’s literally just a triangle of tortillas with pepperoni in the middle. Technically, it’s a slice of two circle tortillas with pepperoni sandwiched in between.
Technically, it’s food and Riz hates it.
He eats it though, but he can’t remember eating it. Somewhere between thinking it’s gross and getting to the second paragraph in his answer, he eats all the tortillas in his box.
Somewhere between those times Fig actually starts snoring too, her head on the desk– no, cafeteria table. Riz watches Adaine stare at her for a moment, her face is all pouty, it’s always pouty after exams. Or stress. Or a lot of the time, really.
It’s not so much scrunched up, he doesn’t know how to explain it. Like she’s sucking on her tongue, maybe. She probably is, Adaine does do that a lot. Sucking on her tongue, tapping her fingers, glancing around. Anxiety, Riz knows. High, high anxiety. He used to do stuff like that, biting his claws and his lip and rocking back and forth and so on.
He’s not rocking now. His legs are wrapped around each other at the bottom but he’s not rocking. He rocks a lot, it’s weird that he’s not right now. He can’t be bothered to move.
But it doesn’t require moving to look at something, so Riz kind of stares at Adaine who stares at Fig in a state of anxiety Riz gets quite close to experiencing sometimes, and he knows she’s deciding on whether or not to move her head because even though her arms are around her face it is not propped up on them, kind of just blocking the very bright white lights of the cafe.
But Adaine doesn’t want to do anything wrong, and Riz gets that, and if she wakes Fig up Fig will jokily get annoyed and Adaine will then ask her many many times if she’s annoyed at her, and Riz cannot listen to that right now because Adaine being anxious will make him anxious instead of the weird type of feeling he’s currently got in his body which is that he’s definitely currently existing and that is about it.
Adaine stares at Fig until Gorgug reaches sideways and slides his hand under Fig’s face to lift it a little bit, using his other hand to push her arms closer to her body and then placing her head down onto her arms. She doesn’t wake up, and Kristen reaches over the table to put another funyun on one of her horns, her face all bored and dead like how the rest of them are.
Riz, not wanting to think about his friends feeling like that, counts the funyuns that Kristen has managed to put on Fig’s head either without her knowing or without her caring enough to say anything.
- That’s how old he is.
Jesus christ, he’s old.
Well, he’s not. Not compared to Fabian, not compared to the others. He’s the youngest out of his friends, born in august. But he’s old.
When he was 13 he wanted to be 16. He doesn’t know why. It felt grown up, probably.
He doesn’t feel grown up.
Right now, Riz doesn’t feel anything. Maybe a bit younger than sixteen, actually. Maybe fourteen again. Maybe age doesn’t exist because everyone is going to die anyway so what’s the point in keeping track of your age?
The voice in Riz’s head that’s not-quite-him-not-quite-his-mom tells him to stop thinking and eat again, so he picks up a grape and puts it in his mouth and thinks about birthday cakes and presents being the point in keeping track of your age.
Riz eats the grape, feeling it crunch under his teeth. Oh, he forgot grapes taste good- wait no they don’t.
Or maybe they do?
Sour. Nice crunch but sour. A good sour? He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s his mouth that has a weird taste and the grapes are fine. Maybe washing out the mouth taste will make the food taste better.
Oh! He has a soda in his bag. He can drink that. Nice, he likes that soda, so Riz takes it out of his bag and twists the lid off.
Oh, it’s barely fizzy. Well, maybe it’s kind of fizzy if he drinks it?
Riz drinks some and is proven wrong. Well. Not much he can do about that.
He exists for a little bit. That’s the only way of describing it. Riz exists for a little bit, he almost spills his soda trying to pick it up (fucking clumsy hands) and Fig continues to sleep and the others continue to do nothing apart from Adaine who is studying like him. He kicks Gorgug’s legs by accident– the only legs he can really kick, really, because they’re long enough to reach his short ones– and impulsively apologises in a whisper.
The cafeteria is quiet now. Somehow.
When he apologises, Riz feels faint surprise at being able to speak, but moves on quickly, like someone else is surprised for him.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Gorgug whispers back, and he nods in the silence.
Silence, nevermind about that, there’s yelling outside the doors. End of the day? No, Riz glances at his laptop clock and there’s still an hour left. Why are so many people– freshman boys, of course– moving around at once?
Oh, transition times between classes. That would explain it. At least they aren’t coming in here.
One of them is screaming of course, and Riz almost wants to scream back. He does, in his head, but it just makes him want to do it out loud even more. Like a tic.
Almost immediately after that thought is had, Riz blinks harshly against his own control.
Shit. Didn’t mean to start that again. Well, as long as he doesn’t think about it more-
And.. his head jerks up.
Double shit. Uh, move on? Move on, move on-
The bell rings for the next class, and Riz wonders if that’ll trigger him again. And then, by wondering, it does, and he blinks and his head moves and he kind of just then stares at his laptop and tells off his own brain.
Stupid thing, really.
He ponders what it would be like to not have to have a brain, and then goes back to answering his question.
A few minutes later, Riz’s right arm starts going all cold, which means it’s been in the air for too long. He’s been typing, he doesn’t remember what but he’s been typing, and his arm doesn't like it. The blood isn’t going to it properly, because his arms are above his heart right now. Although they really aren’t, actually. They just don’t have blood going to them properly when they’re above his stomach, more like.
Riz faintly remembers Fabian saying that that’s “not a thing that’s supposed to happen to you, The Ball,” but Riz doesn’t want to think about that. He doesn’t want to think about the blood going around his body, whether correctly or incorrectly.
He ignores the cold feeling and continues typing. His arm has gone a little bit spotty, like darker spots. Very very tiny, almost a rash, but it doesn’t itch.
He panicked about that, once. Thought he was dying and did a bunch of research into what was happening, why was his hand and arm suddenly all rash-y. What was it called again?
Riz opens a new tab and searches up “spots on hands causes” because it was on his hands when he panicked, but that just brings up a bunch of allergy or eczema stuff which isn’t right so he closes the tab and tries again, searching “can poor blood circulation cause spotty hands?” which brings up something called Mottled skin which isn’t what he thinks was what came up last time, but his memory is kind of bad for stuff like that so maybe it is. He clicks on it and it looks right, and then he checks his hands to make sure.
Oh, that’s worse. His fingers look worse.
Well, enough of that, then.
Someone is drilling. Very loudly. Why they are drilling in a school, he has no idea. Maybe they’re doing some work or something. Well, of course they are. Why else would they be drilling, for fun?
The drill is going into his head. It feels like the drill is going into his head and it is very loud and Riz does not like it. Fig doesn’t either, stirring for a moment and lifting her head off her arms, her face red from the pressure.
“..Fuckin’ wha?..”
Gorgug opens her bag and puts her headphones over her ears, and she puts her middle finger up at him in return. And then she frowns at her hand and rearranges it to the rock sign, and then her head flops back down onto her arms again.
Riz is rocking, now. Just a little bit.
A group of junior boys are now in the cafe, talking loudly. They’re muffled, though, Riz’s headphones block them out.
He forgot he was wearing headphones. They aren’t on, why aren’t– oh, he turned them off, battery was low and he wants to save them for the bus home.
He turns them on, now, because even though the drilling has stopped it might come back and the boys are loud and he doesn’t like listening to their voices. They’re too low.
Sometimes he feels like that with Fabian, but he tries not to. It’s not nice to not like someone’s voice.
They have fifteen minutes of the day left.
No, less than that. Ten. Now eight.
Riz is so tires. Tired. Tired.
No, he’s not tired. Ignore the fact that he went to sleep at midnight and woke up at five to revise for this exam. He’s not tired. He’s just drained, which is better because he needs to recharge emotionally. He needs to do something fun. Like play a game or do a puzzle or something.
He doesn’t have the mental energy for that.
It really sucks, not being able to do anything. Not being able to do anything because he’s too tired mentally drained, but being bored when not doing anything.
Riz feels a weird feeling in his head, like he’s about to cry. Which is weird, because he doesn’t cry. But his eyes start to ache and then his nose starts aching and it feels like a cousin to crying, a little bit. An estranged cousin.
But, Riz doesn’t feel enough to cry. He just sits there with aching eyes and an aching nose until the feeling goes away again. It always goes away very quickly.
Maybe he should have a hug. He wants one, Riz realises. But Fabian— who came back at some point, Riz half-remembers remembers saying hello to him— is on his crystal and Fig is asleep and Kristen is also on her crystal and Gorgug is staring into space with his headphones on and Adaine is actually studying and her hands are shaking and her shoulders are all hunched and she probably definitely doesn’t want a hug right now.
Riz realises that none of them but Adaine care about these exams. They don’t care. They’re going to fail.
Adaine works because she gets anxious about her self-worth if she doesn’t. That’s a habit.
Riz works because he knows he has to. He works because his mom doesn’t make enough money to support him all his life. Riz works because he’s a goblin and probably definitely got something wrong with his brain and he won’t get anywhere in life just by existing and not trying because no one wants to give him anything that easily.
Riz wants a hug. Something in his chest and his body aches and he wants a hug but he looks at his friends and they don’t look like they want to give him a hug right now.
And Riz doesn’t want to ask them.
His body aches.
His arm hurts.
His mouth tastes weird and dry.
His eyes hurt.
His eyes and nose ache.
Riz takes in a deep breath, and then the bell goes for the end of the day. Riz packs up his stuff and leaves for the bus even though Fig— when she wakes up— offers to have him over at Mordred and Adaine and Kristen nod in agreement. Riz doesn’t really want to, though, well he does but if he exists in the general vicinity of his silent friends for more hours he thinks that he’ll just turn into a depressed ball of existence.
So Riz politely declines that offer and goes to wait for his bus. He gets a different one to everyone else, now that they don’t live at Strongtower anymore.
His isn’t here, yet. None of the signs in the windows say where he lives, so he waits for it to arrive like a few other people. One girl that gets on his bus is near him, so that’s fine he’s not just been unobservant somehow. A sophomore he’s made polite conversation with in the past makes polite conversation with him again, and then another bus arrives.
And it’s not his.
Riz looks around for the girl that gets on his bus, but she’s gone.
The other buses start moving.
One of them must be his.
How did he miss the sign? How- how did he miss the sign? Riz is so good at reading, at focusing. None of the signs said his area, he swears, he swears it. None of them did.
Did they? They might have done. He’s not been very focused lately.
He fucking missed his bus.
Riz wants to cry. He feels like he actually might, this time.
But he’s in school. And crying won’t help him get home, so Riz takes a deep breath and starts walking to Strongtower apartments.
He takes a deep breath, and holds it all in.
Riz’ headphones die five minutes later, five minutes into the forty minute walk home.