#that sitting in my bedroom on a sunny afternoon aged 15 felt

[aefensteorrra]

I think a lot about my 17 year old self now that I'm 27 and remember how I used to watch vlogs made by women in their 20s doing mundane things wondering if I'd ever make it that far, if I'd be capable of doing any of those things... now I realise my everyday life is something my teenage self found so incomprehensible and that gives me a lot of hope for the future

[jungnoir]

prince!jaemin confidently kisses his princess when she will only awaken with her one true love’s kiss. distraught, he kisses you again, and again, desperation seeping through when nothing happens and knight!jeno averts his gaze full of shame

battlecry;

⇢ summary: love is cruel, ignorance is bliss, and all good kings must learn this. prompt belongs to @itsmultifandomtrash! 

⇢ relationship: na jaemin/reader/lee jeno. 

⇢ genre: prince!au, knight!au, angst. just angst. if you came here looking for a good time you will be attacked.

⇢ words: 5.8k.

⇢ warnings: unrequited love. sad boy gang.

a/n: I’m not sure where it went, but a few days ago, @trashknj tagged me on @nctangst‘s post about prince!jaemin where @itsmultifandomtrash sent in the above prompt and asked if I could write it! I got really inspired by it so I decided to give it a shot! hope I could do it justice~ my heart hurts :)

The palace was the quietest it had ever been since the day you were poisoned.

What used to be a sanctuary for laughter and happiness was now like a tomb; its silent walls would close in on you in the long hallways, its cool breezes now felt like icy fingers gripping at any piece of exposed skin it could reach. Royals would have dinner in silence. Nobles would visit with the utmost sincerity in their hearts as they offered their condolences to the king and queen for their daughter. Servants would meet each other’s eyes with grim looks, the question on everyone’s lips but never uttered for fear of reprimanding: would the princess ever wake from this curse?

When the witch had struck you, you had dropped like a rock. Days had gone by since the angry sorceress burst through the crowd of adoring subjects who’d welcomed you into town that too-sunny Saturday, cursing you where you stood because “tyrants should never smile”. It was in the wake of a recent law passed to abolish black magic, and while you’d never had a hand in the commandments of your country, you were the one who suffered the price.

Morbidly, the subjects were at least happy you weren’t dead, but a dreamless, wakeless sleep didn’t sound much better. Your chest still rose and fell underneath the sheer white fabric adorning your chest and your eyelids would flutter every now and then, but never did they open. Your fingers might twitch or your body might shiver when the cold night air would rush in from your bedroom window, but you did not cuddle into your sheets for any warmth. Your blood ran warm underneath your skin, but you were as good as dead.

The ordeal had arisen during the week that Prince Jaemin had come to visit you.

Pen pals since youth, Jaemin was your best friend and, soon to be, husband. You had confided in him for everything from the start of your youth until the moment you’d become a true adult in the kingdom’s eyes, a shining eighteen years of age which meant that you were that much closer to ascending to queenhood. Jaemin, too, was also soon to become a king of the neighboring kingdom of Na, and your parents had found it fit to put you two together. The arrangement had been announced only a few weeks ago, but they’d apparently been planning it since your tweens. Jaemin had been excited after years of writing to you, waiting to see you again for the first time since you were just children, and the week had been planned to a T. You’d meant to show him around the kingdom, show him the best of the crown city, and it was that particular day that you had to cut into the tightly packed tour for a quick public appearance.

Had Jaemin known that that day you’d be cursed into an endless sleep, he would have gone with you.

It was no secret to anyone in the palace how much Jaemin hated that he had not been there to protect you. Even when you both were far apart, your letters to him about your hardships and the snooty royals that’d come to visit would always spur him into a very long and very cheesy rant about how he wished he could slay your dragons for you. He considered himself to be your knight in shining armor, and you had never really disagreed. Yet, even with all his passion, he knew deep down that he would not have been fast enough to intercept the curse on its way to you. Most nights though, he dreams that he could have been.

So he’d stayed longer, written countless letters to his parents about how he refused to leave your side until you were all better, and the monarchs of Na and your kingdom were more than understanding given the bond you both shared. He’d stay forever if it meant that you would never be without someone by your side. He insisted that it must be him, had to be him, because he loved you and you loved him, and if you love someone the way he loves you, you don’t leave them for anything.

The only other person who seemed to feel that as much as he was the stoic knight at your chamber’s doors, stiff as a board and adorned in the armor of the kingdom’s military. He was already a higher-up knight by the age of 15, fighting many battles in the name of the king with what the prince had heard was nearly godly strength and will. When you had gotten a little older, the king decided to assign his best and youngest knight to you in hopes that he would guard your life as well as he guarded the lives of his men on the battlefield, and do that he surely did.

After the first two days of sitting by your side, clutching your hand in his until the warmth shared between them caused his palm to perspire, he decided that he could not take the silence anymore. The sounds of your even breaths seemed to only drive him slowly insane, the prince practically waiting for the moment they might stop altogether. So he talked to the knight instead.

“Did you grow up here? In the crown city?” Jaemin asked the knight one day, fingers still wrapped around your own. It was a hot summer afternoon, that much he could tell from the heat of the sun beating on his back through the balcony.

The knight did not stir, nor made any move to remove his helmet. The blasted silver thing glared at Jaemin from across the room, the only barrier he had between him and the knight. You had written fondly (and in great detail) of the great knight Jeno’s personality many times in your letters to the prince, so he knew not to take it personally when Jeno didn’t answer right away. It had taken you two years to get him to fully open up to you, and even then, you still suffered from Jeno’s quiet nature.

With nothing to do but wait, Jaemin just continued to watch the knight. He used the silence to examine the knight from head to toe, from boot to helmet. He noticed the sword slashes on the metal that scarred what he knew was once crystal clear. Some were closer to his neck, others closer to his left arm where the armor stopped and a mesh covering allowed for better movement of his arms. He’d once been told by his father that a man without a few scars had not yet become a man. Jaemin was sure Jeno had plenty.

“No, your highness.” Jeno finally answers, voice intense and echoing in the metal confinement around his head. Jaemin perks up some; he hadn’t expected such an answer so quickly!

“A nearby town, then? I hear most people only come to the crown city to live a better life. It is rather beautiful here after all, a city by the sea.” Jaemin hums fondly. You both were supposed to go to the beach on the weekend of his visit, right before he was set to return home for further kingly preparations.

Jeno doesn’t move still, but a hum mirrors the prince’s in the hushed room and it is nice. “Not nearby, your highness. I traveled quite a way to be here, but you are right about the last part. I came here for a better life. For my family, too.”

The prince’s chest swells with a sweet feeling; a boy as young as he turning to the crown city in order to make a better life for himself and family was not new under the sun, but he still rather admired those who did it. He knew that if he wasn’t born into such fortunate circumstances, he’d be willing to do the same in a heartbeat. 

“I wonder,” Jaemin starts, wistful as he turns his gaze back to your peacefully sleeping face, “if in another world, I was like you. Perhaps, if in that world (Y/N) was still a princess, I would have been able to make it to her like this. Like you.”

Jeno somehow stiffens even more at this. Jaemin doesn’t notice, “Would we still have fallen in love? I’m certain we would have.” Affectionately, Jaemin reaches to cradle your face as a sick feeling begins to settle in Jeno’s stomach. The prince had no idea. “She has that kind of heart. She would fall in love with someone no matter their status, because she’s just that way.” The prince had no idea.

Jaemin smiles, lost in his own world as if Jeno wasn’t even there. It’s just you and the prince as far as he’s concerned, and he’s just dreaming of the day the court mage finds a way to wake you. He knows you’ll be waiting for him as he has waited for you. “I must sound so childish and naive,” Jaemin directs this to Jeno without looking away from your shut eyes, “but I know there’s nothing in this world or the next that could separate us. It just feels destined. Nothing could destroy destiny.”

The knight is happy he isn’t expected to reply, and that is maybe the last time he gets that feeling. The prince had no idea.

The conversations grow each day.

Jaemin would either wake from beside you because he’d fallen asleep next to you, or he’d be rushing from the royal guest’s quarters at the crack of dawn to your bedroom doors. He would always tell Jeno that when he was there, the knight could rest easy outside the room. It was really his way to talk to you aloud, attempting to coax you from your sleep as the court mage worked away on figuring out how to wake you. Since the ban on black magic, many of the mage’s dabbling in the arts had to be halted unless absolutely necessary, and this situation was deemed absolutely necessary. The court mage mainly worked with health and protection potions for everyday afflictions, so this meant that it would take a little longer for him to summon the right counter to a curse and make sure it worked on you. It didn’t matter to Jaemin or the king what it took, so long as you were awake and smiling again.

Until then, Jaemin was content with talking to you. He would recall times you’d spent together as children on holidays or brief visits, or he’d discuss some of the events you both chronicled in your letters to each other. Each conversation would end with a solemn “I love you”, each word dripping in sincerity. He’d been saying it to you as much as he was physically able to ever since he’d found out you were both to be engaged. He hadn’t rushed you to say it back of course, the king and queen assuring him that his feelings were most certainly reciprocated. They’d told him how shocked from excitement you’d been to hear the news, and Jaemin had felt like he was on cloud nine. You had never been so bashful with him in his whole life until that point, but he assumed that it was because you two had never really addressed the possibility of being something more than friends before… it was new territory. He understood that much.

Jaemin tried not to bore Jeno with countless questions about you (or even more specifically, questions about how you felt about him), but sometimes he just couldn’t help it. Like now.

“Did she talk about me a lot to you?” Jaemin asks over his dinner. The prince rarely spent time away from your room, even to eat, so the maids would bring him something up each evening. Sometimes, he’d wave a bit of your favorite foods in front of your nose teasingly, wondering if that might wake you. It never seemed to stop you from snapping to attention before.

It had been a week since the first conversation with Jeno and since then, Jaemin had requested of Jeno to not wear his helmet. He had hoped that without the obstruction, he’d be able to get more comfortable with the knight, but even without it the knight was as motionless as ever. Lips tightly pursed, eyes always facing forward, brows even. It was Jaemin’s goal to get the knight you cared for so much to like him. After all, he’d be seeing a lot more of him in the future.

Jeno takes his time to answer as always, thankfully never leaving Jaemin hanging, “A bit, your highness. She described you as her best friend.”

Jaemin blushes, looking down at his food. “Is that… so? I always wondered if maybe she’d make a closer friend here. I guess that spot was reserved for me. What else did she say about me?”

“That you were easily excitable, your highness.”

“Eh?!” Jaemin screeches. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

While others might have flinched away at Jaemin’s tone, maybe afraid they’d offended the prince in some way, Jeno does nothing of the sort because he knows it’s harmless. He continues to stand tall, though his eyes glide to Jaemin for one of the few times the prince had caught him doing so, “I assumed it was due to your childlike nature, your highness. I’m sure she didn’t mean it in a bad way.”

Still, Jaemin pouts. “I’m… I’m not easy.”

Jeno looks away from him just as slowly as he looked to him, “Of course not, your highness.”

“Hey,” Jaemin lightly scolds, “you don’t sound too convinced!”

The knight’s lip quirks up a bit and Jaemin really can’t believe it. Was… was the stoic knight really smiling right now? Had he really just made Jeno smile? “I’m sorry, your highness. The princess’s sentiments of you have left an impression.”

Jaemin huffs, though he’s happy that there seems to be a more comfortable air in the room now. Even if it was the smallest twitch in the lip, Jaemin counts Jeno’s smile as a success through and through. The pout leaves the prince’s lips finally, changing the subject, “Well, when she wakes, we’ll have to have a discussion about that. She can’t ruin my charming reputation without my consent.”

Again, Jaemin is surprised when Jeno makes a small sound. Almost like a… chuckle. Just barely there, his ears would have lost the sound to the wind had it not been such a soundless night. Jaemin laughs a little on his own, too, delighted. “Of course, your highness. Though I cannot promise her willingness to change her ways, I’m sure you’ll make a good effort.”

The prince shakes his head goodnaturedly, taking a sip from his chalice as he throws a glance your way. It feels odd to have you here but not have you really here, the prince thinks. How he wished you would wake and add to the conversation, but no such thing would happen just based off of intention alone. The court mage was getting close to exposing the counter to your curse, so he just had to wait a little longer. Imagine how thrilled you’d be when you found out that he and Jeno were getting along! Even being friends! He could see the pleased smile on your face as clear as day, as if you were really smiling at him inches from his face. He sighs contentedly.

Jaemin decides he’ll spend tonight talking to you again, but he won’t tell Jeno to leave the room this time. He doesn’t feel the need to be private in front of him right now, and if he can help it, the bond between the two of them might grow stronger just by listening to the adventures you both shared in your youth. “Thank you for talking to me again today, Jeno. I can see why she cares for you so much.”

Jeno had feared this before when he’d taken off his mask for the first time. He’d been able to keep himself emotionless in the face of the prince on several other occasions, but he isn’t sure he can hide the way his face falls at the thought. A swirling pit of guilt has begun to accumulate in his gut and has yet to disappear since the prince had gotten here. It had been so much easier before he’d actually met the prince to see him as some kind of battle, like the ones he used to face in his younger days. This wedding was your battle to fight, and Jeno would be guarding you every step of the way. Sympathizing with the very cause of his grief was the last thing he needed. Yet, here he stands, joking and laughing with the prince as if he isn’t the reason why Jeno’s nightmares are all of your wedding day, marrying someone that isn’t him while he fades into the background.

It had barely felt like a day had passed since you both last professed your love to each other, since your only concerns were bringing up the relationship between you both to your parents. His biggest fear was that the king and queen would not allow him to court you, to one day marry you if you so wished. Yet now, his biggest fear was that that chance to tell them would never even come, and you would fall for your best friend, the prince, who seemed to know you much better than Jeno did. With time, your feelings for the knight would disappear, and Jeno would watch it all with a heart that would never repair itself.

And here this very prince was, thanking him. Thanking him for comforting him while the love of both of their lives lay unconscious mere feet away. It was sick. Though the witch had probably meant for the curse to hurt no one but you, the king, and the queen, they had seriously miscalculated the ripples this would have on everyone around you. Jeno knew the way the guilt ate at you tenfold, forcing yourself to lie to Jaemin about your “feelings” in order to not hurt him with the truth just yet. You were cornered with nowhere else to go and Jeno could do nothing but watch. Sadly, maybe you were at least at peace in this sleep, free from the clutches of heartache in your chest.

Jaemin thinks that Jeno is just taking his usual time with replying, unknowing of the turmoil that festers behind the knight’s quickly rebuilt facade, “Of course… your highness.”

Three weeks have passed since the curse and Jeno and Jaemin are what Jaemin considers “friends”. Their conversations are considerably longer, and this leads to Jaemin convincing Jeno to leave your room every once in a while for a change of venue. Usually, Jeno would protest to leaving you alone anywhere, but the other knights standing guard at your door promise that they would alert both the prince and Jeno of any changes in your condition if something happened. After a few trips around the palace, Jeno wasn’t as averse to the idea anymore. They’d even managed to make it outside more than a few times.

Their walks were usually full of talking (mainly on Jaemins’s side). Jeno had ended up showing Jaemin parts of the palace that you hadn’t yet gotten to show him, deciding you wouldn’t mind too much if he got used to his surroundings while you were still under the spell. Jaemin had never been the type to just sit still for a long time either, though the sadness and concern he had for you had cemented him to your side without a thought about it for nearly a month. Sometimes, they’d walk through the gardens and Jaemin would tell him about the flora back home. Sometimes, Jeno would request a special lunch for the two of them out near the lake. Sometimes, they’d just circle the grand hall and talk.

It was unusual for Jeno to be so close to a royal like you until he realized he fell for you and you him. This, however, was different. He could not readily consider Jaemin a friend, especially when the truth had not yet been revealed to the other, but he still felt… friendly. He had meant to stay as impartial to the prince as possible, an attempt to keep his soft heart from caving in on itself at the thought of ever telling him the truth about you and him. He believed that with as little attachment to him as possible, even possibly looking at all of Jaemin’s flaws alone to help him, he could feel less terrible for this setup.

But he still finds himself caring for the young prince anyway, and he wishes selfishly that you’d awaken because he isn’t sure he can do this without you.

According to the mage, the curse that had been used on you was emotion based. There was no amount of herbal medicine that could bring you back from this sleep, but they weren’t totally sure what was needed to jolt you awake. In some cases, a curse like this would be fixed with some kind of internal shock, some interruption of dreams, something that your soul would feel rather than your body. Knowing your waking was so close was happy and terrifying for Jeno; there was so much you hadn’t gotten to talk about since the announcement, and there was so much that needed to be talked about that Jeno had a hard time keeping mental purchase of them all.

Today, he can let himself forget some of them as he and Jaemin watch the sea from the highest tower in the palace. The salty air is refreshing to Jaemin, a prince from a kingdom that is surrounded by dense forests and rain rather than ocean water. “Jeno, do you get to visit the beach often?” Jaemin asks.

Jeno stands beside the prince whose arms are folded on the stone ledge, eyes squinted at the early evening sunlight streaking the blue water with ripples of white. Until Jaemin, he had never walked around for this long without his helmet on. It wasn’t necessary for him to do so inside the palace, rather just a habit of his from his battle days, but it also gave him the impassive and intimidating aura that kept people from messing with you (if they ever so thought to). He’d begun to dress down too, another thing he wasn’t so used to. Instead of his bulky armor, he adorned some of the less restrictive clothing for moving around on the palace grounds. It made him more approachable, much to his confusion. All Jaemin’s idea.

“No…” Jeno pauses, attempting to adjust to dropping the formal “your highness” when no one else was around, “I’ve been once or twice, but not for fun.”

Jaemin frowns, casting a glance at Jeno over his shoulder, “That should be a crime. You can’t live here and not get to visit the beach every weekend!”

Jeno scoffs, amused, “Have you ever thought that maybe I don’t want to go to the beach?”

Jaemin turns up his nose and shuffles a bit on his feet, “Well… I don’t know. You don’t?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, I just… have no reason to. I don’t have anyone to go with.” Jeno admits. He doesn’t add the last bit about how the one person he’d want to go with could never.

He doesn’t have to, it seems, as Jaemin does it for him, “I’m sure (Y/N) would love to go with you. You know, as a friendly day out. If only this whole class system wasn’t so royally unfair, you two could go and no one would haggle you about it.”

Oh, how Jeno had daydreamed about just that for so long. If only Jaemin knew. Jeno could only respond with his best response to things like that, “Maybe in another life, but not this one.”

Jaemin flips around so that he’s facing Jeno with his back turned to the sea, his elbows propped up on the ledge now. He is squinting too, but not from the sunlight, that’s for sure. “You shouldn’t be so cynical, Jeno. I promise that one day in the future, me, (Y/N), you, and someone special will go out to the beach late one night without anyone finding out to just be free. By then, I will have appointed you to nobility, had your family moved out here to live with you in a villa on a nearby island, and gotten you acquainted with a charmer of your choice. You’ll be living the life, Jeno.”

Jeno blinks at the absurdity of Jaemin’s claims, “I-I never agreed to any of that. And you should be glad no one higher-up is around to hear you speaking like that.”

Jaemin just rolls his eyes and kicks his foot out, back and forth, “Don’t you think it’s nice, though? I know I’ve only known you for so long, but I can really see how much you care about (Y/N). And, since we’re getting married, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together. I don’t want you to feel like you’re lesser than us, Jeno. You should be able to be comfortable around us and your family deserves to see you more than just once a year. Wouldn’t you like that?”

Jeno can clearly see the heart in Jaemin’s words, even as his own clenches at them. The truth is obvious to himself of course: he wouldn’t like that, not all of it anyway. He’d rather stay the way he is now, several ranks below you, untouchable, than to ever feel like he had even the inkling of a chance of being with you the way he wants to. With Jaemin in the picture, it’s the best choice anyway. Jaemin can’t see that though, should never have to, because Jaemin has done nothing but be kind to Jeno this whole time. Jaemin has done nothing but embrace him like a friend, and Jeno… Jeno just can’t. It just cannot be their truth. Jeno knows he will never be happy unless it’s at the expense of Jaemin’s happiness, and that is now far too taxing of a reality to bear.

Jeno doesn’t get to answer him, probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway, because the sound of rushing steps up the tower’s stairs catch them both off guard. Moments after the source of the steps reaches the doorway to the octagonal room, sweat is coating the face of the servant who’d sprinted to find them. She tries to catch her breath as Jaemin straightens up to address her, “Are you okay? What’s the rush?”

The servant bows quickly toward the foreign prince, “My apologies your highness, I did not mean to interrupt your conversation with Sir Jeno, but I have important news. Princess (Y/N)’s curse has been solved: we know what will wake her.”

Jaemin and Jeno both stand to attention, eyes darting to each other and then back to the panting servant. “Really?” Jeno rasps, urgency bleeding through his tone like a gushing river, “What is it? What will wake her?”

The servant draws in a heavy breath and even dares to crack a smile, eyes locked solely on Jaemin as she answers, “The princess’s curse will break upon the kiss of her true love’s lips.”

Jaemin runs faster than he ever has before. He’s not even sure Jeno is behind him when he thrusts himself through your double doors, a triumphant smile on his face when his eyes fall upon your figure. The king, queen, court mage, and a few servants stand around you all awaiting his arrival. The minute he makes his grand entrance, the smiles that beam at him practically light up the room.

The king is joyous as he welcomes the prince, “My son!” He calls heartily. A stab to Jeno’s heart as he enters a few moments later. “Quickly, quickly. You must awaken her.”

Jaemin’s ears go a little red at the prospect of sharing his first kiss with you like this, in front of all these people, but he knows that it is to save you and bring you back from this curse. He’d do anything to hear your voice again. Meanwhile, Jeno can only stand a few feet away in a disassociated stance. He doesn’t want to believe he’s experiencing this right now. He wishes that he could be anyone else.

“My stars, my stars,” Jaemin whispers adoringly as he collapses beside your body. You still look serene, and he can’t wait to see your eyes opening to look at him. Him, him, him. His favorite thing is to be seen by you. Your eyes dancing with warmth in them when you’d greeted him the day he got here had been playing in his mind on repeat for the last three weeks, and now… now, you were going to be awoken by true love’s kiss. His kiss. “Oh my stars, forgive me that this is our first kiss. Please wake and I’ll make it up to you.” Jaemin clutches your hand in his and squeezes it tight, imagining that you’ll squeeze it back. You don’t, but it won’t be like that for long.

Unable to contain his excitement, Jaemin looks to Jeno before he swoops in, smile not wide enough to even try to show the extent of his excitement. His eyes lock with the knight’s, but Jeno looks like he’s seen a ghost. It almost stops Jaemin in his tracks, almost. His excitement gets the best of him as he tries to remind himself that Jeno may just be overwhelmed; the entire room is overflowing with expectation and if it wasn’t the adrenaline Jaemin was being fueled by, he might be shaking at the thought of kissing you awake. Right now though, he has no time to worry about Jeno’s reaction. He’s far too focused on you.

He takes your face between his hands and sighs at your beauty, before letting himself descend delicately. He whispers sweet nothings to you as he leans down, lips inches to centimeters apart. His lips are dry from gnawing on them incessantly and he scolds himself for not being prepared to give you a pleasant kiss, but he hopes you won’t mind.

Finally, he meets your mouth.

It’s his first time kissing you and he can feel sparks exploding in his chest. There’s a party going on beneath his ribcage, or maybe that’s just the rapid beating of his heart. This is everything he wanted and more and he’s so, so nervous. He can’t pick up on anything but the pounding in his ears and the pressure of lips he’s waiting for to meet his own. He’s waiting. He’s waiting.

He’s waiting.

He’s… waiting.

Jaemin pulls back some, still holding your face. You don’t wake. He leans down to kiss you again, this time quicker and a little more sober, but when he pulls back yet again, you are still asleep. His eyes, in his desperation, flicker to the court mage who looks as dumbfounded as he and the rest of the room. One kiss, one small kiss from your true love was supposed to wake you from your slumber without a doubt. It’s what his Book of Shadows had told him, what he knew to be true from tales long past, so it should have worked. Jaemin had done everything perfectly, after all. 

The prince releases your cheeks and stares at your face. You’re motionless, just like you’d been for the last three weeks. His kiss… had done nothing.

So, he wasn’t…

The queen gasps when it clicks. Jaemin goes still when something entirely different clicks for him.

It should have been clear before.

Jeno is avoiding his eyes but there are tears staining his cheeks already. His lips are shaking like he’s going to full on bawl in a moment. No matter how hard Jaemin stares at him, Jeno won’t look. He can’t. He mustn’t. If he did, he might not be able to bear it.

Jeno should be happy with all other things isolated; Jaemin is not your true love, and any doubts he had that you might have unexplored feelings for the prince are crushed at the same time that he realizes what this means. There is no one else you are as close to as you are with Jaemin… except him.

He is always with you, always by your side, your confidant when writing a letter will take too long. Jaemin may have known you longer, but contrary to Jeno’s beliefs, he didn’t know you better. Jeno had seen more of the you that you are now than Jaemin had, and that meant something. Something terrible, something wonderful… depending on how you looked at it.

And Jeno knew the whole time, the prince realizes. He didn’t tell him.

“…so… you wouldn’t have liked that, then.” Jaemin whispers, and nobody but Jeno knows to what that he’s referencing.

“I’m so- so sorry.” Jeno’s voice cracks, full of more emotion than he’d ever shown the prince since they’d met. He can’t stop crying as he feels the world crumble about him. He knows what he should do next, but he never imagined that his feelings would be exposed this way. Never would have wished for it.

Jaemin is suppressing a sob because he knows that that’s what kings do. He couldn’t cry now. What would that make him look like? A babbling child in front of the people of the kingdom he was hoping to rule one day by your side? He could never. He should never… but he is mourning inside.

The prince stands with every pair of eyes on him except that of the knight’s. You lay still, unaware. At that moment, everyone wishes they could be you (Jaemin the most). He takes in a heavy breath, centering himself like his father had taught him to do when faced with a situation that he was unsure of. He breathes in, and out, eyes shut to block out the vision of Jeno sniveling a few feet away, though the sound is loud and clear in the dead silent room. He has to get this over with, and it’s now or never. No matter how badly he wanted it to be him, it wasn’t. He hates that it’s Jeno. But…

Jaemin steps away from you with a heavy heart, holding out a hand to motion to you. Jeno looks from the prince’s hand to you, then to the prince’s detached expression. “Then you must wake her, Jeno. Please.”

“…O-of course, your highness.”

[pipesflowforeverandever]

The Ink Demonth, Day 15: Time Travel

I borrowed @aceofintuition‘s Joey Drew, “Snowy”, again for this alongside my own, “Gingie”. This drabble is based on an RP we did together some months ago. You can tell by the length how much I enjoyed writing it.

Summary: An old man with blue eyes steps into the page of someone much younger with dreams ahead he still can’t see.

Word Count: 2942

The aging man heard the ring of the café door as he stepped in, the gentle sting of coffee immediate underneath his nose and its faint taste on the edge of his lips. His eyes glanced around at a world seemingly tinged brown like a yellowing photo, the soft, warm hues evident everywhere on this sunny autumn evening. There was a record playing somewhere as the sweeping of a broom scuffed next to the counter that caught the silver fox’s attention, but his light wrinkles crinkled a bit more as interest in the cleaning was brief; he was here for something else.

Someone else, he found as a shade of reddish-orange caught his gaze, and he felt lured closer just like a curious fish in the sea.

The young man had his back to him, a briefcase shadowed by his side as it leaned against the leg of a chair. He was the brightest thing in the room, like he lit it up the same way a candle does the spare, dusty bedroom; everything around him just seemed to follow suit to his cream sleeves and tan-brown pants. His cup of gold-tinted tea rippled as he bumped the table, reaching down for a hardcover book with pages sticking out in much the same way the case did.

The newcomer, still standing, allowed his ice blue stare to cling as he walked past the busy, seemingly ditzy boy. Or…well, “boy” as an accurate term is determinate on how old one is when perceiving it. The redhead certainly wouldn’t consider himself a boy at the ripe old age of 22, but someone without a line of color left in their grey hair would, and the mysterious person letting his black cloak rub past the seats as he made his way to the window was such a someone. It wasn’t until he sat down that the distracted kid had finished lugging up his notebook and felt his expression still at the appearance of someone he didn’t expect to see again.

After all, Joey had lived here for years, and most unusual folks he spied on in the park didn’t show up again somewhere else. Not in the same day.

The stranger was beautiful, with hair styled almost impossibly in a large swoop from the left to the right side of his head; the end of it had a distinct wave, and it all looked dyed as if steeped in moonlight for nights on end. His brown skin shone with the glow from the window, leaves falling from the tree just outside it past a pair of irises that would put the finest crystal glass to shame.

The aspiring artist with already pinkish skin felt it become pinker, heat nibbling at the top of his cheeks and the tips of his fingers and knuckles. The pages laid across his desk were undoubtfully familiar; what were the chances that he had seen them as he strolled past to the booth? In his panic, he calculated it to be high; even if the old man refused to look back at him, he must have known.

He’d find out many, many years later he didn’t, but the wrong assumption made the right thing to do. It was inevitable anyway, in a certain sense, as sketching strangers in the park without them noticing was a practice that can’t eventually go undefeated.

And Joey, even when he was young, was a man proactive in his introductions. Perhaps a bit more on the shy side than he would be running a studio, but still someone that would rather talk than let silence rule the day.

And so he did.

“G-good ev- afternoon! Sir!”

The silver-haired man lazily blinked and glanced to the side at the youngster who was hardly taller than him even when the former was sitting and the latter bouncing to the tips of his scuffed shoes. A grown man, perhaps, but Joey would always be teased for never growing an inch more. The blue-eyed man evaluated him, another set of honey eyes flickering slightly but constantly with nerves that had a shaky smile to match at the corners of his mouth. He noted there was no mustache above his lips, but still sideburns and glasses to accessorize his head.

He played dumb. “Hey.” The newcomer’s voice was deep with two accents coming together, one a southern drawl and the other the unmistakable hint of someone accustomed to speaking Spanish. “…What can I do for ya?”

Yes, of course, he had noticed the ginger staring at him from afar some hours ago. Yes, of course, he was going to enjoy seeing him squirm for a reason to cover it anyway. Truth be told, he was surprised that the kid came up to him in the first place; he figured it would be up to him to initiate a conversation, if one was going to happen.

But that had always just been Gin, it turned out. The old man tried not to smile at the idea of it, so there was just a twitch on the left side of his mouth.

“I- I was just!” Joey held his hands in front of his chest, chin turned down to restless, fiddling fingers. What could he even say?! ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for sketching you without even talking to you first’? No! He wasn’t even sorry! …Just sorry he got caught.

It was only then he supposed maybe he hadn’t been caught, as he assumed. The realization it was far too late to back out felt like a push on his back to keep spitting out words and hope they make sense.

“I…I hope this doesn’t come off in the wrong way, my good man!”

Said good man raised a brow as the other squeaked his way around the situation.

“But- but you made for a lovely inspiration!” Joey kept grinning until it hurt his face, as he looked at the stranger for any sort of reaction.

“…Beg your pardon?”

Oh.

“I! I simply!” Come on now, confidence! Only thing left to save him now! “I’m an artist! And I do life studies! And you simply are just FAR too interesting to ignore!”

And in both excitement and fear, the old man felt himself involuntarily tilting his head back as a book was shoved into his personal space, pages flicking until it fell to the last ones before the rest of the book seemed orderly. And there, indeed, was his own face.

In awkward silence, his wide eyes flicked back to look at the others’, just to see the ginger in the same sort of anxiety inducing panic that he was before- perhaps amplified. He blinked again. Somehow, he still wasn’t used to this kind of attention, even if he knew he should have known better.

Gin was a weird kid.

With the young man waiting, seemingly, for him to react first, the stranger gently gripped the book and pulled it away so it was at a better angle for his eyes.

And although he knew he was avoiding the growing need for a pair of glasses, the old man also understood at a glance this was something special.

“How about…” the older man drawled with as much patience he could muster, trying to begin a proper conversation, “…’Y pull your stuff over here? ‘Magine your back hurts from standing up so straight.”

With that, he had to try not to chuckle as he saw the kid realize his stance and overcorrect, abruptly adjusting where his limbs were in relation to his body before scrambling to bring his things spread across the table in an armful. They were spread once more before the other next to the window, and it didn’t take long for him to try to forget at least a bit of the horrible introduction that just happened.

It almost felt like he was evaluating his portfolio, with a bright-eyed new artist waiting with a bounce in his seat for commentary on the accumulation of his work and skills.

So he was the kind of guy to pour himself out without even knowing if the other person was an artist or not- just someone he…wanted to approval of. The old man supposed there was something there he was supposed to think about in relation to his friend, but didn’t have the attention to word exactly what as he plucked up a random sketch- a seemingly candid one of a rabbit tucked behind a thin bundle of flowers.

“These are nice,” the old man commented with a sharp but approving glance over. “Y’ got a real eye for detail, here, kiddo.”

It still didn’t cross the youngster’s mind that the whole ‘I’ve been drawing you’ thing was pushed aside so easily for a reason. He had been watching him back for even longer; no explanation was needed, and he couldn’t improvise a realistic response anyway as if he was surprised.

“I’m…an artist, sir,” Joey repeated again, somehow steadier this time but calmer. “I just draw what I see. And I quite enjoy it! I just-“

Joey interrupted himself with a hum that trailed off, in some way not wanting to finish that thought. The other man pursed his lips.

“Just what, kid?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“…Can’t really drop all these drawings on my lap and call whatever you want to say about them nothing, you know.” His tone was dry but the meaning was sincere, a tinge of softness in his voice, a kind of understanding a bit too familiar to put aside.

As such, after a few more seconds of fumbling, the shy young man simply nodded in agreement.

“Now…” the older continued, setting the held page down to pick up another, “…What do y’ wanna do?” The question was taken with a bit of shock, but he continued as easygoing as before. “What do you…wanna make with all this? What’s the dream, kid?”

It did feel like a dream, Joey inwardly agreed. He plopped himself onto a total stranger and found himself without hesitation being probed about what it meant to him. And usually Joey had answers! He could go on and on and on without taking a single breath about what it meant to him to create things, about wanting to do things for others to see. But he always said so unprompted; now that it was actually asked of him aloud, he found himself floundering on what to say.

“I…”

The old man tried to pretend he wasn’t staring at him, wasn’t so invested in the answer that he couldn’t hear anything else.

Joey exhaled and folded his hands on the table, thumb smoothing over his own skin in restless ponderance- a good emotion for a matching time in his life.

“I would…love if I could, somehow, use my art to…make people happy.”

Now that was something he had never considered, but there it was- spoken by none other than himself. He briefly bit his lower lip and looked out the window, perhaps avoiding making himself look at his art and the man that was now- unbeknownst to him- clearly staring with intent.

“I…want to do what my mother always believed I could do. You see- see, she told me I had a special kind of magic that matters to other people. That I’m so bright that…I can make others bright too, just by making them smile.”

It was so, so hard for the stranger to withhold his smile for just a second longer.

“But I…don’t quite know how that can be done!”

Joey’s eyes flickered back, and the nervous smile had returned; in spite of his optimism, it was like putting a blanket over the unsure, tumultuous waves of the sea.

“Then you try something out.”

The response, as quiet as it was spoken, was still strong and unexpected, and so Joey felt himself gasp. His honey eyes widened, and his whole head turned to attention.

And now- now he was letting himself smile. The man opposite of Joey knew that he was looking this time, and that it was when it mattered.

“You keep tryin’, no matter what. And piece by piece, something will come together. Just like when you figured out how to draw, right? Assumin’ you were normal and learned things as you went instead of being perfect on the first go.”

With his lips lightly parted, the young man in awe of someone who could- for all he knew- been spouting motivational nonsense without knowing a lick about art…was entirely believable.

It was the right thing at the right time, regardless.

Those brown irises had eyelids fall over one second more, returning to his own creations with a new perspective. The lines seemed more purposeful, the shapes more unique. It was something flawed and yet flawless, just as he had always seen anyone else’s art.

The old man was quickly becoming satisfied with the rare feat of making Gin stunned enough to shut up. He thought about leaving right then and there, as if this was all he had come to see and do, but he was once again the person between them surprised when the redhead stood up first, scooping up the papers in his arms. The young man forced his eyes away but towards the end of the collecting finally met his again, a twinkle there that made the silver haired wanderer feel more at home than he had been this whole time.

“Thank you,” he muttered, words slick and airy with what could only be relief. “Thank you.”

He stood up straight, adjusting his hold on his things until they were more orderly and less likely to fall away. “I…do hope to see you in town again.” His grin was fading in and out with each phrase, but the feeling was so pure, so freed, that an excuse wasn’t needed. “Apologies for…not…asking first!” he chuckled, buckling at the knees briefly.

The other man chuckled back, the sun setting behind the glass. “No problem.”

A wonderful, awkward pause filled the space between them, the conversation ending as it started with one sitting down and the other standing up. Joey didn’t know that the other person would have as much a reason to try to treasure this moment as he did. Eventually, he took a step backward and slowly turned around through the now near empty café, towards the front door and the streetlights beginning to be lit.

“Oh!”

And he spun right back around, much to someone else’s bemusement.

“What…-” the redheaded scamp asked with hesitation, “-Is your name?”

Looking him up and down, having forgotten to introduce himself too, the fellow with moonlit hair and a black coat leaned his arm around the edge of the booth and took a moment till he smirked.

“Mr. Flores.”

The man with sideburns and glasses nodded, mouthing a ‘right’ before abruptly turning back and leaving the room. Mr. Flores watched the brightest splash of color in this world stained like aged paper walk out his life, looking forward when he would walk back in. With he himself looking like he was out of place and dyed with blues- with an indigo tint in his clothes and the cyan like glittering water under his eyelids- decided it was his time to leave, too.

The suitcase Gingie had forgotten was reverently taken by the handle before disappearing in a portal, the rim of which shimmered blue, too.

The old man ducked out and into the room of another person, someone who he had grown old with. Nighttime had fallen and the shadows of unlit halls looks like ink thin and seeping into the wallpaper. What he surely knew was yellow now seemed a bit on the cooler side, and someone he had just seen looking like the fire of the sun in daytime now seemed like wax of a candle extinguished, in his cream shirt in the dark and top hat hung up on the coat rack. Gingie, his red hair looking paler as strands of it turned white, glanced up from a paper held between his fingers. His gaze was soft, mischievous, and made Snowy feel at home.

“Mr. Flores,” the other Joey smirked.

A hand came to hold his back, the two old men together with more winkles and greyer hair than when they first met- for either the first time or the second time. Snowy scoffed, grinning wide.

“You weren’t supposed to remember till I brought it up to ya!” he lamented humorously. “Wasn’t supposed to be that I just…show up after accidentally running into you in the past, then you suddenly know too. More dramatic than that!”

Gingie scoffed right back. “It seems like you and I have exchanged some…traits over the years. And here you were always teasing me for being the one to portal into your life first.”

Snowy sighed through his nose as a rosy hand cupped the side of his face, tilting into it with hooded eyes.

“…Nah.” Then the toothy grin came back, devilish. “You were as much of a chicken with its head cut off as ever.”

And to that, the other pursed his lips, still holding his cheek. “And you were as subtle as ever.”

Basking in the moonlight of the time Snowy was really from, Gingie pulled him closer, their silhouettes seen through the window if one was looking- their faces becoming one shape and the outline of their bodies shining like the glass under the stars, frost around them like a picture frame as snow began to fall. The lost suitcase was set down and very likely forgotten for yet another several decades.

[ecotone99]

[RF] Lovebug

LOVEBUG by Brandon Haffner

I’d been huffing model airplane glue for two years before I met Beef Gilbert, but he was the first person to make me feel stupid for it. The few friends I had couldn’t be counted on to look out for me; they could hardly look out for themselves. Those poor teachers at Woodland Acres Middle had bigger messes to clean up. And Mama—she was clueless. Too busy watching Golden Girls or The Price is Right or The Twilight Zone—didn’t matter what it was as long as it buzzed bright on that box of hers—and I couldn’t blame her, because Pops died in a freak accident when I was six, so she was all alone with me. This was another thing drew me and Beef together. His pops was dead, too.

By all accounts, Beef Gilbert was a maniac. He showed up at our school in August of 1987 and soon became known as “the kid who cut that cow open.” Like, if you were to see him for the first time, from afar, you might nudge the person next to you and ask: “Hey—is that the kid who cut that cow open?” Hence the name: Beef.

Around school he roamed the halls alone. Ate lunch by himself at one of those corner tables by the stage where the lighting wasn’t very good. He liked to remind people, loudly and half-grinning, that his mom worked at Wal-Mart and that he lived in a trailer park south of Jacinto City. Word spread that you could get him to do almost anything if you paid him enough.

I was on my second detention when I met him. Early September, the last breaths of stinky, sweltering Texas summer pouring in through broken window seals and cracked concrete. The air conditioning couldn’t keep up. During every lesson—x and y and z axes, power paragraphs, Ulysses S. Grant—we were melting.

I was fourteen and the only girl in detention that day. He was fifteen—he’d been held back a year at his old Houston school—tall for his age, slick blond hair, sweaty, and fat. His breath was a gargling wheeze. His too-big Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt sagged off him. His square, thick-rimmed glasses were the kind you’d find on a ninety-year-old man.

He sat surrounded by empty seats. The other kids huddled in the corners to sleep or draw or read comics. Beef was flipping through a porno mag. No effort to disguise the naked woman on the cover. I glanced at our detention monitor, Mr. Briggs, who was young and nervous, and my guess was, being a fresh fish, he didn’t want to bother with this notorious big boy.

If you asked me back then why I, a somewhat self-respecting girl standing on a fragile reputation built from hard-edged coolness and occasional witty jabs, sat next to Beef Gilbert that day, I would have shrugged and said I was bored out of my skull. Which wouldn’t have been a lie—I thought, as eighth graders do, I’d seen the whole world.

“Heard you cut up a cow or something, over the summer,” I said. “Why’d you do it?”

He put down his porno mag and glared at me. He wore dirty gray sweatpants and I saw under the desk he had a little hard-on.

“Me and that cow had a political disagreement,” he said.

I laughed. Then he laughed.

“Poor cow,” I said, joking now. “Was it still alive when you did it?”

“Check this out,” he said. He flipped the magazine around so I could see. On the page was a naked Asian woman on her hands and knees.

“I see the appeal,” I said.

“I doubt it,” he said. “They even got smut where you’re from?”

“Where I’m from? I live four blocks from City Hall,” I said. “I’m not some rich girl.” I thought about my bedroom the size of a janitor’s closet. Mama’s rusty Cavalier I could hear coming three blocks away. Frozen corn dogs, frozen fish sticks, canned noodle soup—our dinner rotation. Bedroom air conditioner that rattled and hummed all night.

But secretly I was flattered. All any fourteen-year-old girl stuck wearing off-brand clothes and cheap hand-me-down jewelry can hope for is that her sweet style and perfect makeup fool someone into thinking she doesn’t live in a run-down duplex.

Flatly, quickly, as if he’d said it before, he said: “Yeah, you’re not rich, and I’m not a lard-ass.”

I don’t know what it was like at other schools, but at Woodland Acres, teachers used detention on kids the same way I use duct tape to fix broken stuff around my apartment. Skipped a class? Detention. Late to school? Detention. Broke into a locker, tore down a poster, stole a kid’s pack of gum? Detention. Made fun of or disagreed with a teacher? Hit a girl, kissed a boy, spit a spitball, made a paper airplane out of a math test? Brought booze or weed or the wrong kind of glue to school? Didn’t stand up during the Pledge of Allegiance? Detention. Hell, if your parents called enough times to whine about your grades, you could go to detention for getting a D. Which meant some kids, God bless them, got detention just for being dumb.

With Beef and all his strangeness waiting for me, detention became something I looked forward to. Like the bell ringing at 3:15 every day, I could count on him being in that room when I got there. Same porno mag, same circle of empty chairs around him, the other kids keeping clear of his body odor.

“What’re you in for?” we started to ask each other, like new cellmates.

And he’d tell me the story, usually something like, “I threw my apple core at Miss Gracie. Ryan Bishop gave me fifty cents to do it.”

And when he asked what I was in for, I’d say, “Same as always.”

And he’d shake his head and say, “Stuff’ll fry your brain,” followed by, “Check out these titties.”

And I’d say, “You know I see titties every day. In the mirror.”

And he’d peer down at my chest, and when Mr. Briggs wasn’t looking I’d pull my shirt up to my collarbone, just for half a second, to show off how good they looked in my pink bra.

This, more or less, became our routine.

One afternoon in detention, I wrote Beef a note. Mr. Briggs had silenced our conversation with an urgent, pleading glance, and in the silence I stared at my notebook. Usually I would have drawn some crazy thing—a dragon with broken wings, an upside-down truck on fire—but that afternoon I was feeling chatty.

I wrote down some jokes about Mr. Briggs. Scratched some doodles of Mr. Briggs with various classroom objects up his asshole. I added, as a P.S., a suggestion that if Beef were to wear some clothes that fit him, clothes that maybe had been washed recently, he might look better. Not good, not handsome. Just better.

I passed it to him, and he gave me this look: anxious, embarrassed, confused. He seemed more shocked by this piece of paper than by my bra flashes. As he stuffed my neatly folded note into his sweatpants pocket, he coughed and asked, “You going to Ghoulish?”

The Ghoulish Gathering was the Woodland Acres Halloween Dance, the kind of mid-year, low-budget, cafeteria event that attracted only the school’s most desperate and dorky.

“No way in hell,” I said.

“Me neither,” he said.

I continued to write Beef little notes and to receive little notes from him. When he started calling me Lovebug—never in person, only on paper—I returned the affection.

“Dear Lovebug,” we’d start off.

His drawings were faceless stick figures with enormous penises, or terribly drawn motorcycles, or symbols of sports teams. Sometimes he’d draw abstractions, lines and curves and dark spots that had me searching for some deeper meaning. His letters were short and disjointed.

Dear Lovebug, one of them read. I ate like no food this week and am still fat. The universe is unfair. Please stop sniffing glue. It’s gross. One of these days you got to tell me how your dad died.

That was it. No sign off.

About a year before I met Beef, my best friend Mia—who was the type of girl who said “fuck” for no reason and dyed her hair a wacky new color each month and wore rings on all her fingers—walked me over to the gas station one afternoon to buy me my first tube. It felt weird in my hand, hard like a rock, only I could push the sides in a little. Testors brand. “Works the fastest,” Mia said. That same summer she showed me how to stuff tissues into my bra in a way that didn’t look lumpy and I showed her how to cut little slits into the front of her jeans to show off some thigh. “You bad little tease,” I said when she put the jeans back on.

At school I huffed straight from the tube. But at home I used the bag. To get the best high, you squeeze half an inch into the bottom. Place the bag over your mouth and nose. Inhale, exhale. Repeat, repeat, repeat, each breath deeper than the last, and soon you’re riding an escalator up a grassy, flowery hill, above the clouds, and if you’re lucky, it’ll be sunny up there, and if you’re luckier still, you’ll meet Jesus Christ. Boredom was never so beautiful.

Beautiful for about twenty good minutes anyway, and then I’d start finding myself in the bathroom wiping blood from my nose with toilet paper. I started buying tissues at the gas station every time I reloaded my supply.

I started looking for Beef in the halls between classes. One time, I stopped by his locker and asked him about the pictures taped to his door. Mostly cutouts of women in bikinis. A few photos of his Rottweiler.

“His name’s Ass Wipe,” Beef told me.

“Fitting,” I said. “He looks like shit.”

“And this one’s my dead dad.” He pointed to a young-looking, physically fit bald man wearing a collared shirt, clean white dress pants, and shiny dress shoes. He was sitting in a rocking chair, smiling at the camera.

“How’d he die?” I asked.

“Overdose,” Beef said, laughing and wheezing, then coughing. He looked at the photo and pressed his index finger against his dad’s head. “Yeah. He was a dumb bastard.”

And another time by his locker we were playing rock-paper-scissors to see who’d get the last piece of gum in the pack we’d pooled money to buy from Patrick Hutchins last detention. Beef threw paper and I threw rock, so he covered my little fist with his big hand, then said, “I don’t want it,” and handed me the last piece.

“Thanks Beef,” I said, popping the blue stick in my mouth. “What’s your real name anyway?” I asked.

“Dennis,” he said. I’d expected a war to draw it out of him, but he didn’t hesitate. “Dad used to call me Denny.”

“Denny? Like that breakfast place?”

“I told you he was a dumb bastard.”

I was only trying to play along when I said, “Well at least someone’s continuing his legacy.” I even elbowed him in the shoulder and winked big and hard to exaggerate the sarcasm, but I knew as soon as I said it I’d cut some place in him that was dark and bruised.

“Whatever. At least I don’t wear kiddie clothes and a gazillion layers of makeup,” he said, punching his locker shut. “You look like one of those creepy five-year-old pageant girls.”

Normally his lines about my dress weren’t so vicious. More like failed attempts at flattery. This particular year I wore a lot of pink. Pink fingernails, pink T-shirts, pink bobby pins, pink shorts. I even owned a pink watch. I didn’t wear all this at once, of course. Tasteful pink. “Your highlighter shorts are blinding me,” he’d say, or “My little cousin has a Barbie in that same outfit.” He’d gurgle and wheeze and laugh at his own joke and I’d roll my eyes.

But when he crossed the line—“I bet you got a whole dresser full of pretty pink panties,” for instance—I’d make a point, in front of whoever was watching, to demean him.

I’d say, loudly enough for a few bystanders to hear, “Give you two bucks to fall down these stairs,” or “Give you a buck fifty to slap Mr. Briggs on the ass,” or “How about you full-on sprint to each of your classes today, Beef? A quarter per class.”

Sometimes Mia was with us. She would help me find loose change to give him.

“He’s hilarious,” she’d say. “He’s something else.”

He’d do whatever I asked. Every time. Didn’t matter how many people were around to laugh at him, or how much detention it landed him, or how bad his coughing got afterward. He took the money up front. Usually he smiled about it, his dorky sad smile beneath those gigantic glasses. The kid was a walking cartoon character and he knew it. A clown. Almost everyone seemed amused by his act.

Sure, I stood and watched with the rest as he performed. But if anyone had glanced in my direction, they’d have seen how I felt. More than once I caught myself pressing my hands together and shifting my weight from foot to foot, hoping to God the poor idiot didn’t hurt himself.

Now that I think back, it wasn’t nervousness or even guilt. It was much more. It was that sick, stabbing pain in my gut, almost how you feel when your lover betrays you. Disgust. Disbelief. It was that he’d truly do anything. It was that, after a long day of shit grades and nasty looks from teachers and throbbing glue headaches, sometimes all I wanted was detention, his big dorky eyes looking at me and his sweaty notes making me laugh. It was fear that this poor fat boy loved me. It was fear that I could love him.

Tuesday after Labor Day I sat on one of those concrete benches overlooking the school’s brown front lawn, waiting for Mama to pick me up. She was late as always.

I pulled out my notepad and drew gargoyles and princesses. When detention got out, Beef walked through the glass doors and sat next to me.

“You got any pot?” I asked. “I been thinking about trying pot.”

“You know I don’t do any of that shit,” he said. He shook his head for emphasis.

“Just fooling with you,” I said. “Grump.”

We sat. An airplane ripped the sky open. Someone far away pumped some life into a lawnmower.

“When I first heard about you I thought you’d be some tough guy,” I said. “Some brute. A name like Beef. Beef who killed a cow. But I bet you’ve never even seen a cow in your life.”

No response.

“Sorry I missed you today,” I said. “What were you in for this time?”

“Wasn’t my fault. Just some assholes being assholes,” he said. “Like always.”

“You gonna beat them up?”

“Shut up, Emma.”

“I bet you never hurt anything ever.”

“How much?” he asked.

I looked at him.

“How much you want to bet I’ve never hurt a thing? For real,” he said. He was wheezing again.

“You should see a doctor about that chest problem you got,” I said. “Because that shit ain’t normal.”

“How much?” he asked.

“A buck,” I said. “Show me what you got.”

We went behind the school and into the woods, down a long hill on a foot-worn pathway, over a wooden bridge, and across a creek littered with beer cans and cigarette butts and candy wrappers. I’d never been back here before. After twenty minutes, the woods opened up into a green-yellow pasture, a few sun rays spotlighting the place, including, in the distance, an old blue farm house and its grey barn, and, just beyond the barn, the highway coming into the city.

Beef grabbed hold of the low wooden fence in front of us. Just a few feet away, like a joke, was a “No Trespassing” sign, accompanied by a bigger, handwritten sign that read, “I Will Shoot You.”

“Seems taller than it was before,” Beef said, running his hand along the fence. He lifted a heavy pale leg over the wood, made a grunting noise, and landed clumsily on the other side.

Then I climbed over. He watched me.

“Even I’ve got more grace than you,” he said.

I punched his arm. He pretended it hurt.

I followed him away from the house and down near an algae-covered pond. Mosquitoes swarmed.

“Here it is,” he said, pointing down at our feet.

It was so much a part of the earth it was hardly noticeable. But yes, indeed, there was a dead cow, or a pile of dried-up cow parts I should say, in fact not recognizable as a cow at all, except that I knew what I was looking for. There were no flies because the flesh was gone. Just a few bones, dead grass, and a big dark-colored spot on the ground.

“Tell me the truth, Beef,” I said. “You did this?”

“Fuck yeah, I did,” he said. “I’m a murderous cow-killing machine.”

“A true psychopath,” I said.

“A raging psychopath,” he corrected.

“Twenty bucks says you found this cow dead of natural causes.”

He kicked the small pile of fragile bones. Dirt and bone fragments everywhere. The mosquitoes were giving us both hell, and he swatted at them crazily, like each bite was a surprise.

“I like this dance you’re rocking,” I said.

Then he grabbed my wrist hard and he pulled me away from the bones. He led me back to the fence. My wrist started to hurt and my fingers were going numb, so I yanked my arm away.

“What’s your problem?” I asked.

“You don’t have to insult me every second, you know,” he said.

We walked through the woods without talking. The crunching leaves. His labored breathing.

When we got back, Mama’s brown station wagon was waiting for me.

“Want Mama to give you a ride home?” I asked him.

But he ignored me. He sat on the bench, took his glasses off, and set his chin in his hands as we drove away and left him there to wait for whoever.

I spent a lot of time in my room that year. I listened to Blondie and The Clash. I drew two-headed unicorns and tornadoes uprooting neighborhoods and man-eating plants. I threw darts at an old dartboard I’d found in a Pizza Hut trash bin when Mia and me were wandering around town one night looking for stuff to do.

And I talked to Beef on the phone. He was sometimes funny, sometimes stupid, sometimes sweet. But always surprising.

I’d ask, “What are you doing right now?”

And he’d say, “Taking a dump,” or “Training for the Olympics,” or “Waiting for you to come over one of these days so I don’t have to play checkers by myself anymore.”

And I’d make suggestions for the future, like the time I said, “Once you get your license we should go to the Cinemark. You like horror movies?”

“Nah,” he said. “My life’s a horror movie.”

I laughed. One morning later that week, though, I got the sense of what he meant. I found a note in my locker he must have slipped through the little vent:

Dear Lovebug,

Chase who is my asshole step-brother and me and my cousins went to that pond last summer and they gave me a knife and said stab that cow. They didn’t pay me so I said no way. But they got this syringe and stuck me with it. They pushed me down so I wouldn’t get away. They are doing all sorts of drugs all the time with my stepdad so I might have gotten some drugs in me. They said stab that cow or we’ll keep on sticking you. I didn’t do it on purpose.

It could have been my imagination, but that note changed us. I mean, we never spoke about it. I made sure of that. In fact I made sure the word “cow” didn’t even come up in conversation. But this secret, twisted story had an effect. We joked less. Maybe we were nicer to each other. At least until those miserable weeks after Ghoulish.

One late night on the phone, after Mama’d gone to bed, I told Beef how Pops died in a factory fire, and that I hardly had any memory of him, just a flash here or there from some tiny corner of my brain, his image fading more each year.

Beef asked, “Was your dad nice to your mom?”

I was on my knees on my bedroom floor and prepping a huffing bag. I brought the bag to my face and breathed in, breathed out, in, out, in, out.

“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t remember what you’re doing?”

“If Pops was nice to Mama. Too young I guess.”

Sometimes our conversations went so deep into the night we’d start to nod off, phones pressed to our ears. One of those nights, I was in bed with my eyes closed and the lights off. A long stretch of silence went by. Beef was breathing slowly, loudly.

“You awake?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Me neither.” I said.

The rumbling air conditioner switched off. The crickets in the yard hissed and pulsed. A streetlamp buzzed.

“Why don’t you like your mom?” he asked. “I want to meet her. Decide for myself.”

“She’s lazy. Sits around the house all day. Gets her welfare check and goes straight to happy hour. And she hates me,” I said. “She hates everything. She’ll hate you too.”

“Well your taste in music is pretty terrible. And your drawings. If I were your mom I’d be disturbed by those drawings.”

“I don’t even think she knows I draw.”

“I’d send you to an institution.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if she did. Get me out of the house.”

“You should show her. Draw something not so gross. I’m being serious. You know, guilt her into putting it on the fridge and shit.”

“It’s a little late for the fridge. I’m not six years old.”

My ear was getting hot, so I switched the phone to the other side.

“She a druggie?” he asked.

I almost laughed. “Mama’s not cool enough to do drugs.”

A long silence.

“Did your pops?”

“Did Pops what?”

“Do drugs,” he said. “You know. Crack. Pills. Meth. Weed. Glue.”

“He drank a little,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I tried to picture Pops. Maybe it wasn’t my memory—maybe it was Mama’s complaining for years after he died that created the picture—but with my eyes closed, my brain all afloat on glue air, I could see Pops with a glass of brown liquor on ice, sitting on the orange couch in the living room, watching MAS*H. That couch was the one our old cat, Juniper, used to piss on, the one Mama and me took sledgehammers to a few years ago. Juniper—I’d almost forgotten about him. Raggedy gray hairball, always hissing at everybody but Mama. If you wanted to find him, you’d just look under that couch—two narrow yellow eyes and a low growl would be there to greet you. Mama loved that cat. Saw herself in him a little bit, I think. Not long after we tossed out the couch pieces, I came home from school to find Mama crying on the floor holding a limp, lifeless Juniper. I can’t say I was too upset about that cat’s passing, but for Mama it was almost like Pops had died all over again.

“Emma?” Beef said. I realized he’d said it several times. I was almost asleep.

“Oh,” I said.

“Goodnight.”

Two weeks before Ghoulish, a tall boy from my lunch table asked me to go with him and I said yes. In detention one afternoon I shamelessly told Beef all about him, hoping, I think, to see the hurt on his face. The boy’s name was Alfredo, he was from San Antonio, and he said corny shit like, “You’ve got a great Emma-gination,” his eyes were starry green, and his hands were that perfect blend of soft but firm on my hip in the lingering moment after a goodbye hug in the hall when he didn’t want to let go just yet.

“Sounds like an asshole,” was all Beef could muster.

But a week later Alfredo either forgot about me or changed his mind because he asked out none other than my Mia, and when I told Beef, he said, “Your Mia? Mia Mullins?” and I said, “That’s the one,” and Beef said, “What’s he thinking? She’s got more acne than you and me combined.”

As we parted ways, surprised to find my hand shaking a little, I handed him a note, which went something like this:

Dear Lovebug,

Have a hot date yet for Ghoulish? If not, want to go with? Don’t get ideas.

He handed me his response in detention that afternoon:

Dear Lovebug,

Hope you break dance cause I’m a champ.

That week on the phone, all he wanted to talk about was the dance. He said things like, “I’m going to bring a bag of sugar in case they play ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me,’” and “I bet you’ve slow danced with like a hundred guys.”

“I want to cut out like halfway through,” I said. And I told him I’d pictured the two of us talking in a corner, not dancing at all, maybe heading back to my room to listen to music and draw and talk, like Mia and me used to do.

“Your mama won’t mind?”

“Have you been listening to anything I’ve ever told you? Mama doesn’t mind anything.”

“Okay, but we gotta slow dance once,” he said.

“No promises.”

“Number one hundred and one, here I come.”

But of course we didn’t get that far.

Mama left me $20 a week. Every Monday morning there was one bill on the kitchen counter. Given that Mama had no job, I always wondered where this money came from. I found out later it came out of Pop’s life insurance. The poor man was funding my glue habit from the grave.

Back in 1987 you could buy a lot with $20. Four or five movie tickets. A new shirt. A Sony Discman. A decent dinner out. A shitload of ice cream.

Or a dozen eight-ounce tubes of Testors.

But the day before Ghoulish, when it came time to resupply, I found the Walgreens completely out. So instead I picked up some paint thinner—I thought I’d heard about one of Mia’s friends using it. Came in a plastic bottle a little taller and narrower than a soda can. I walked home and ran up to my room and stuffed the bottle under my mattress.

Then I went downstairs for dinner; I remember this dinner well. For some reason Mama’d cooked lemon pepper chicken and some type of stuffed pasta with actual dinnerware, not the plastic plates I usually took up to my room. It was the most impressive meal I’d eaten in months. Before sitting down, I asked:

“What’s the special occasion?”

I got this nasty look from her and some response like:

“Does it need to be a special occasion if I want to cook some damn chicken for us?”

“What’s up your ass?”

“If you’re gonna talk like that don’t talk at all.”

“Fine with me.”

We ate the delicious meal in dead silence, save for the smacking of our lips and the clinking of our forks against our plates. When I finished, I went upstairs, locked the door, cranked “Death or Glory,” stuck my hand under my mattress, pulled out the now-warm can, shook it, heard my liquid destiny sloshing around, and took, as they say, the plunge.

Dear Lovebug,

When I wake up to get ready for school in the morning and put my clothes on, I sometimes pretend my clothes are ancient armor. Many, many girls for hundreds or thousands of years have worn this same armor and now it’s mine. It’s all rusty and it’s got some holes because you know it’s so old, but for the most part it’s good trustworthy armor. Now that I write it down this seems dumb. But even though it’s pretend and I know I’m too old to pretend, the armor has got me through lots of mornings when I just didn’t want to go to school. You know what I mean? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Anyway I’m writing this note at the hospital so I won’t be at the Ghoulish and you’re probably not going to get this note in time but I thought I should write it anyway.

Yes, I’m in the hospital for the reason you’re thinking.

I guess that’s all.

Emma

At the bottom of that note was a drawing of my own face, frowning, a tear streaming down one cheek. The finished product—eyes way too big and wide, too many half-erased sketch lines around the edges, crazy hair, pointy nose—looked nothing like me.

As any idiot could tell you, huffing paint thinner isn’t anything like huffing Testors. Less like riding an escalator up through clouds than like riding a train that’s on fire and the cabins are full of smoke and the whole thing is sailing off the tracks down into a ravine and you know it’s just a matter of time before you hit bottom and blow up into smithereens, but until then your stomach is flipping and churning and you feel weightless and terrified at the same time as the whole world rushes past you at terminal velocity or whatever.

The instant I unscrewed the cap, my face a good foot from the bottle, the fumes filled my room. The smell swept me back to those lighter-fluid-drenched junk heaps in the woods. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I stuck my nose into the opening and took a huge sniff, followed immediately by another huge sniff, figuring I could skip a step—the bottle acted like a bag by way of concentrating and trapping those wonderful toxic fumes.

Who knows why we do these things to ourselves?

Imagine using two mortars to mash up some glass and habanero peppers, then jamming those glass-and-habanero-caked mortars up your nostrils. Even after I yanked my face from the bottle, grabbed a tissue, and began blowing, and even after those bloody chunks started falling out of my nose more thickly and rapidly than the tissues could contain—my khaki shorts and pink carpet were soaked with red by the time I passed out—the inside of my nose burned so bad I was crying.

If my life was a movie, I’d have woken up in the hospital bed. Peaceful and rested, surrounded by “get well” balloons and some doctor giving me a solemn but hopeful look. No such luck for 14-year-old Emma. No, I woke up in the ambulance, where the pain in my nose was still intense and burning. No way my nose survives this, I was thinking. It’s gonna have to be surgically removed. I’m gonna be noseless forever and they’re gonna make fun of me worse than they make fun of Beef.

Added to my nose pain was this unbearable headache, as if I’d banged my head on the ambulance door as they stuffed me in. I couldn’t stop coughing. My heart raged against my chest like a deranged gorilla. I was surrounded by fast-talking, stressed out, overworked strangers.

Other things I remember: Real bumpy ride. Blurry vision. Lights hurt my eyes. Cold as a freezer. Why was the air conditioning up so high in there? Where was Mama? Wet blood slowly drying on my face. Tried to open my mouth to ask for a Tylenol or something, but nothing came out but another painful cough. And no eye contact with the strangers. Not the whole way to the hospital. What I can’t tell you is if I was avoiding their eyes or they were avoiding mine.

After they got me all fixed up with tubes and oxygen, Mama walked in the room. There was no window, and everything was beige. She sat in the chair next to my bed.

Mama folded her hands in her lap and said, “Emma.” She’d been crying. It was obvious. Puffy red cheeks, wet eyes, that permanent frown of hers. Her half-gray,-half-black hair was a mess.

She put her hand on my hand. I was too weak to move it away.

I expected Mama to get up and leave after an hour or so. But I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was morning, and she was still there, asleep in the chair, her head leaning awkwardly on the beige wall. Later on it would dawn on me that this was the longest stretch of time we’d been in the same room together since Pops was alive.

Mama went and got me breakfast from the hospital cafeteria and came back and we ate together in silence.

“Are you depressed?” Mama said when we finished. When our eyes met I realized she’d been spending most of breakfast working up the courage to ask.

“No, Mama.”

“Did some boy hurt you?”

I laughed, then coughed.

“Well then what?” she asked, impatient. “What is it? People don’t do this for no reason.”

“Sure they do,” I said.

The nurse came in, drew my blood, and left.

“She seems nice,” Mama said.

“I don’t like her,” I said, which was a lie.

Mama stayed with me for the next day and a half.

“It’s no trouble,” she kept saying, as if I’d told her she was outdoing herself. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

They rolled in a TV and we watched whatever Mama wanted to watch. I went in and out of sleep. The doctor told me I was a “perfectly healthy young woman,” but that I wouldn’t be this way much longer if I kept “poisoning my body,” and “brain damage” and “heart damage” and “sudden death” and this and that, and he handed me a pamphlet with the words “FREEDOM FROM ADDICTION” written at the top in all caps, which I threw in the garbage outside the hospital, and which Mama fished out of the garbage and clutched in her lap with her non-steering hand during the drive home and then studied at the kitchen table through her reading glasses for like a gazillion billion hours.

I must have called Beef fifteen times that weekend. On Sunday night, his mama answered the phone. She told me Beef—she called him Dennis—was resting up and wouldn’t be at school for a bit. Then Ass Wipe started barking and she said she had to go.

Mia told me the story at lunch that Monday. Turns out Alfredo had showed up to Ghoulish drunk. Slurring his words, not walking straight. Beef was there searching the crowd for me in his I’m-sure-ridiculous-looking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume. He found Mia and asked her where I was, and Alfredo, who was standing right there, asked Beef how he could be so stupid as to think I’d actually dance with him. Acted like I’d set the whole thing up as a gag. So Beef plopped down at one of the tables behind the crowd and just sat there like a lonely egg. But when Mia went to the bathroom, Alfredo tracked Beef down, acted all remorseful, told Beef I wasn’t worth getting all depressed over, that I wasn’t even that good a kisser—which is a lie—then offered Beef fifty bucks to sneak behind the cafeteria stage curtain, climb the spiral staircase to the catwalk above the stage, and jump off while hollering, “Cowabunga dude!”

So he did.

The stage exploded as if Beef were a human bomb. Broke his left leg and nearly his hip. But the worst part: this little shard of wood came up and stuck Beef right in the eye. Blood was everywhere. As Mia put it, “Everyone was running around screaming like it was the end of days.”

Monday of next week I finally saw him during my break between Spanish II and study hall. He walked toward me down the hallway on crutches, a black eye patch over his left eye. If I hadn’t heard the story first, I would have figured somebody was paying him a buck or two to act like a disabled pirate. When he came close enough to hear me, I took a risk and made a joke of it. I said, “Ahoy there!” But he didn’t respond. Didn’t even crack a tiny grin. Instead, from his right eye, he shot me this wild glare, kind of like the glare a horse—or a cow—gives you when you walk too close to the fence. Like they’re scared and pissed at the same time.

Then Beef lifted the patch to reveal a mess of purple and black flesh.

“Give me a dollar,” he said, “and I’ll let you touch it.”

I stood there like a dope.

“People been handing me money all day to put their fingers in my eye socket,” he said. He reset the patch. “Some people are so disgusting. Wouldn’t you say, Lovebug?”

I didn’t agree or disagree. I dug around in my rotten brain but the words were buried too deep. And after a few awful seconds, he limped off into the crowd.

At home that evening, in my bedroom, my paint thinner was nowhere to be found. My bed was made, too. And the next Monday morning, there was no $20 bill on the kitchen counter.

Weeks went by. I wound up in detention less and less often. The sweltering summer heat was replaced by breezy windbreaker weather. Beef and I still talked sometimes, in the halls. Not like before, but little stuff, like, “Does Mr. Briggs still pretend those ladies in your magazine aren’t naked?” and “Your mama got a new boyfriend yet?” Stuff like that. Then one day he told me he was moving to Louisiana over winter break to go live with his grandpa. Set to go to some high school in Baton Rouge. He’d already been out to visit.

“Best part is, everyone’s a lard-ass out there,” he said. “Even lard-assier than me. For real. I’m gonna be the hot jock.”

“The Hot Jock Cyclops of Baton Rouge.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

His mama’d had a heart attack or something, he said. Hence the move.

Christmas Eve. In my bedroom. Beef had been gone a week. “Train in Vain” blasting on my stereo. I was wrapping a present, believe it or not, for Mama. A pencil drawing of nothing special. A river, flowing down a canyon, and in the middle of it, this big zig-zaggy tree emerging from the water, branches reaching up toward the sky. It was pretty bad even by my standards—never was much of a nature drawer. Figured I might as well give it away. Plus once I’d finished and stepped back from it, that crazy tree kind of reminded me of her. Weather-beaten and old and strange. The type of tree all the tourists would come to see and snap pictures of while asking impossible-to-answer questions like, “How the hell did it get in the middle of the river in the first place?” and “Why hasn’t it fallen down after all these years?”

When she opened it on Christmas morning she cried so many tears it was like God had opened a bottle of champagne all over our living room. She gave me a hug—our first hug in I don’t know how long—and thanked me over and over. It was a little excessive.

After presents, we sat on the couch. She held my hand while her terrible Christmas music played in the background and we sipped the lukewarm hot chocolate she’d made. As she stared out the living room window—where there was nothing but cold, frosted lawn and a deserted street—she had this odd little smile. Her face was still wet. After a few minutes I cleared my throat, and she stood up and asked if I’d like her to reheat the rest of the hot chocolate. From her eyes I understood she wanted me to say yes.

I thought of a thousand smart responses. “Sure, nothing more delicious than chocolate water garnished with powder clumps,” or “But wouldn’t reheating mean it was once heated?” But when I practiced them in my head, none of my one-liners was the clever little needle I wanted. On this quiet Christmas morning, everything I thought to say was a jackhammer, a chainsaw, a blowtorch. So I gave it up.

Inhale, exhale. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

“Sure, Mama,” I said, handing her my empty pink mug.

Published on May 9, 2019

submitted by /u/pottsofgold [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2Nyg8en

[characteresque]

“Don't confuse my silence with compliance.”

Some children have difficulty blocking out all of the background noise. There’s toys to be played with, kids to talk to, secret projects going on inside of coat pockets and notes passed stealthily under the desk; this kind of distraction goes right on through adulthood. There’s bills to pay online in another tab at the office, expertly whisked away from the screen when someone walks by the cubicle…or there’s the ever-skyrocketing demand for “multitasking”, codeword for doing the job of many people for the same pay. Luckily for Chase, the barrage of this outside world ceased for him after a minor and seemingly innocent accident as a toddler – a small fall from the family’s front porch – changed his world forever.

Chase has been non-hearing since age 3 after this small head injury, and nothing has worked to get his senses back in order. Not that Chase ever let that hold him back: in fact, if you’d as him, he rather prefers his life exactly as it is. While it wasn’t the same story for many of his classmates, Chase credits his solitude and intelligence almost solely to his independence of sound. As he grew, his world seemed to encapsulate him in isolation – a warm and quiet place that he loved to daydream. And daydream he did; much to the despair of his hardworking parents. They indeed had their hands full as Chase began feeling out his own world, very different from that of his family; and nothing could get through to him. He fancied himself an inventor, fashioning all kinds of imaginative trinkets out of suddenly broken essentials around the house. In his home, as soon as he located the tool set in the garage, a working remote had an average lifespan of exactly 3 days before it would be kludged into yet another “Chase project”. Bigger and bigger pieces of technology found their way into Chase’s room, taken apart and pieced back together differently each time.

Chase was 16 when he filed for his first patent for what he called the SolarSurfer project. In his mockup, two small platforms about 45 cm long and 15 cm wide each held a small antigravity generator that could lift many times their weight a few feet from the ground. These two apparatus could then be attached to special stabilizing boots, and if the wearer were talented enough…he or she could use the propulsion to navigate. The solar panel was the hardest thing to perfect, a massive 100 cm by 45 cm platform on which the generators must sit; keeping the feet equidistant. Chase pressed on with his study, losing interest in school: while his parents were proud of his advancements with his little “project”, coming home with failing grades seemed to be much more pressing. A rift began between the two parents and their only son, a genius destined to fail if he continued to “goof off” in class.

Chase developed quite an ego by the time high school graduation rolled around. He fought with his parents constantly, refused the company of his peers, and talked back to his few advanced placement teachers in a language of fingers and motions that many of them couldn’t exactly understand. He was a “troubled kid” placed in a special circuit for hearing impaired students…but even in silent rooms with like-minded kids, he found himself alone with his thoughts.

Chase’s bad-boy exterior and general broodiness did have at least one perk: it made him quite popular with the ladies. He had a selection of fine young women at his disposal, but a particularly turbulent relationship with a young equally-troubled girl named Natasha would be his choosing. The two argued extensively, and Chase took great pleasure watching his new plaything stumble over signs and angry gestures as she learned how to speak to him. The two would be on-again off-again as Chase finally obtains his high school diploma, a year late, before obtaining a dead-end job in data management for some Tech insurance company. He had scraped by, his barely-passable grades impossible to sell to the advanced engineering programs at the schools of Technelogia in which he belonged…and he knew this. Chase had a sour attitude and small mindset, and in one afternoon of weakness, his ego got the best of him. He broke up with Natasha, left their small one-bedroom college apartment, and cut all ties with his few friends and small family. He packed very light for his trek across the Requisite: a change of clothes and a project that had sat at the back of his mind for almost five years.

Chase went into hiding in a region that had perked his interest as a teen: the hot, dry, perpetually sunny Ørken Region. With his specialty revolving around solar energy, no region could suit him better. A network of caves wouldn’t seem like the ideal home for an inventor, but after a few months of hot toil, it became exactly that. The roof of his home generated power from the thermal energy of the sand above, and the desert provided everything he could possibly need. Finally, at long last, Chase felt alone enough for his liking: the only one for miles. Now that he was finally free from the expectations of his parents , Chase could dedicate as much time as he wanted to the SolarSurfer…within a year, the patent had been finalized and Chase was not surprised to see the money flooding in. The secretive creator of the SolarSurfer had everything he could possibly want, and onward to the next project he went: a SolarSurfer just for him, different from any others that would ever hit the market.

So, where does Chase go from here? A visit from a Glitch would change his life forever, followed by a steady stream of visiting Players after his location is outed one blustery afternoon. But the biggest blow Chase has ever faced is yet to come: as cheaply made, inferior “SunlightSkater” knockoffs hit the market in his homeregion of Technelogia. Who on earth would pull off such a scam? And what kind of loophole would allow such a thing?