30 Days - Companion

 He’s twelve when they first meet.

 

“Why is her hair like that? Can hair be purple?”

 

“She dyes it,” he explains.

 

She frowns and studies Susie.

 

“Like cloth.”

 

“Yes,” Mark says. “Like cloth and… indigo, right?”

 

She smiles wide, pleased he remembered, and he can’t help smiling back.

 

Some afternoons, he meets her at the old apple tree on the hill, and he brings things with him. He isn’t sure how he feels about girls, but he likes her smile, likes the way it makes him feel, and she loves to see new things.

 

She especially likes books. He never read books much before they met, but now he reads lots. They sit together, not quite touching, and he’ll read aloud to her. Sometimes, she reads aloud to him as he turns the pages, and they’ll stop to examine pictures when there are pictures.

 

When he’s thirteen, he dreams of her, and what her arms would feel like wrapped around him. He wakes hot, pajamas sticking to his skin. He avoids going to see her for days after that. When he does go, she doesn’t seem surprised at all.

 

“Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t know how to explain what he’s sorry about. It seems wrong to think about her that way, and all it does is make his heart ache. He can’t imagine a time she won’t be there, can’t imagine a time he’ll not want to see her.

 

She looks up at him from under the shade of the tree, and for the first time he realizes how very sad her eyes are.

 

“It’s okay,” she says and she smiles the way dark dark chocolate tastes–bitter and sweet.

 

When he’s fifteen, her laughter sounds like wind in the trees.

 

“I love you,” Mark tells her, sincere and fierce, and he thinks the sound he hears is his heart breaking.

 

She doesn’t say anything, his Adella.

 

“I’m sorry,” she says. Then, “I love you, too, Mark.”

 

He nods, and then they sit underneath the tree, just like they always have. He pulls out a book from his book bag, and he starts to read first, the words rough at the edges because his throat is a bit tight, that’s all. Nothing else.

 

Adella sits by him, and if he doesn’t look, he can pretend the sunlight that plays through her is nothing more than the way her skin glows.

30 Days - Move

 “Move,” she snaps at Liza.

 

Liza slides down on the bench.

 

Felicia nearly falls into the newly vacated spot, and Liza hides a wince at the sound. Felicia pulls out a cigarette and lights it in one smooth motion before she scowls out across the football field.

 

“Don’t even,” Felicia says and Liza nods her head a little, because nothing she says will make Felicia stop smoking where she can get caught.

 

Sometimes, Liza thinks Felicia pushes to see how far she can go before things break. It’s going to be either Felicia or the world. Liza knows this, and sometimes it makes her love Felicia more and sometimes it makes her nearly hate her, but, well, that’s Felicia.

 

“Move,” Felicia nearly snarls the next day.

 

Liza moves. It doesn’t matter that she left the spot Felicia sat in the day before available. Felicia pushes, Liza bends.

 

Felicia is nearly buzzing today, her gestures all sharp and angry as she talks, her eyes sparking like lightning as she glares at the teacher who glances up at them on in the bleachers. A dare.

 

Felicia has detention for a week after that, and Liza doesn’t see her the entire time.

 

“Move,” Felicia says, her voice soft in the grey mist of the rain at night.

 

Liza looks up, surprised, because she never sees Felicia except at school.

 

But she moves.

 

Felicia sits down by her. She doesn’t fling herself onto the booth, doesn’t sink gracefully, doesn’t do any of the expected moves. She just sits.

 

“Thanks,” Felicia says, and Liza wraps an arm around her shoulders as Felicia rests her head on Liza’s shoulder. Liza doesn’t say anything, and, for once, neither does Felicia.

 

Later, when Felicia leaves, wiping tears away that Liza pretends not to see, she says, “Thanks.”

 

Liza smiles.

 

“Of course,” she says.

 

“Move,” Felicia says the next day on the bleachers, and Liza moves and pretends there’s nothing different about Felicia’s hand twining in hers where no one can see.

30 Days - Silver

 It catches him off-guard.

 

Not because it is unexpected; oh, no, not that. Common enough on Asgard, after all.

 

Only… it feels as if it has barely been any time at all. He examines himself in the mirror.

 

Silver is, he supposes, better than grey (even if the difference between them is oftentimes a matter of semantics).

 

(And if it feels as if it has been no time, it simultaneously feels as if he’s lived lifetimes, can point at a trail and chain of events that came and went and were lived, and that is equally satisfying, like good wine (which they’ve had much of, or he has, at any rate) and better food (which, yes, they’ve both had, if only because Steve takes so much joy in indulging his whims) on a long summer’s evening (near fifteen, in fact).)

 

“Loki?” Steve calls from down the hall. “You ready?”

 

“Yes,” he says absently, smoothing his hair back and leaving the bathroom.

 

Gold, he thinks, is treated as a birthright by those who have it, flashy and ostentatious.

 

Silver is earned, marker of a hundred thousands small lifetimes to make up a whole.

 

He smiles and Steve smiles in return without knowing what he smiles for, a reassuring touch to the small of his back as they walk out the door.