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The kind jogger with a husband had been the start of it.
The end of it was running for their lives, a joy that had never been found on either’s faces before radiating from them.
Every moment in between was pancakes and slow building of trust and opening up about things that can only be spoken about in the middle of the night on the floor with a tub of strawberry ice cream between two hurting children.
“He is both of their favorites, I’m not even sure they care that I’m gone, as long as he’s still there.”
And
“I don’t know if anyone has ever loved me.”
And later, while eating mint ice cream straight from the tub with spoons:
“The humans don’t care, you know, about things like that,” said the betrayer who loved street art and pancakes and went to petting zoos and libraries. Who had joined an extremist group because things were wrong and his matchlist was girls and he had always known that there was no winning solution for him and it was either marry someone he didn’t love and have his family or love someone he wanted and lose everything.
“About what?” asked the betrayed who had spent years looking up at the betrayer with childish adoration, then teenage admiration, then hurt and rage and how could you do this to me, wondering why it was so painful when he wasn’t even his brother. Who had spent years teasing an uninterested girl to ignore the deeper feelings of admiration towards a boy that was falling further and further away from him.
“About who you marry. They don’t have matchlists or anything like it. Here you just love and get loved in return,” said the betrayer.
“Oh,” said the betrayed. He had never been loved. Wasn’t sure what it was supposed to feel like. Wasn’t sure how to tell his betrayer that he had forgiven him the moment he saw him in the library or how to tell him he hated the matchlists too and wasn’t going to get his because it would be girls and he had never liked girls and he only liked him.
“Yeah, that was my reaction when I realized it too. How can they be so behind in so many things but so much better in others?”
They both sat there staring at the ice cream.
“There was a man in the park. He said he had a husband,” said the forgiver.
“I met a waitress with a wife,” responded the forgiven.
“Interesting.”
“Yeah.”
The forgiver and the forgiven ate pancakes at a cute little restaurant the next morning. The forgiven drowned his in syrup before cutting it with his knife and fork. The forgiver speared his pancake on his fork and took bites like it was cotton candy on a stick. They talked, in between sweet mouthfuls, of the weather and the ducks they had seen at the park pond and what they might feed the cat that kept wandering around the entrance of their hotel.
They were getting better at this whole human thing.
A few days later life came crashing back into them. A moonlark and a shadow and an inventor showed up at their door with secrets and plans and rescues. The exhausted forgiver gave them what he had learned and they told him of their struggles, of how close they were to winning.
He did not offer to go back with them.
When they left with mournful glances back at him he closed the door and waited for the keeper to come out.
“You could have gone back with them,” the keeper pointed out, a small thing like hope burgeoning in his eyes.
“I can’t, we haven’t tried every kind of pancake yet,” the kept stated like it was ridiculous to even consider abandoning him in favor of the fight he had spent his whole life being prepared for.
A new weight settled over their tenuous friendship.
They packed up their backpacks of belongings: unwilling to stay in a place where they had been found already.
A new path had opened before them, one without factions or wars or pressure building since birth. This new path was one filled with new places and new foods and every city in the world at their fingertips waiting to be explored and a million animals to pet and people to meet and, of course, pancakes to try.
The lover and the loved stepped out of their old lives and into their new one with hands clasped tightly together, smiles brighter than the beam of light that would carry them away.
The End