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Your back slumps against the jagged wall of books as harsh rain batters against the wide window looming over you. Your neck cranes down with an ache, the same ache that causes the sky to groan with a rumble. The sunset bleeds in through the streaks and obelisks of clouds, washing the room with a fiery red, a red that burns like it’s the sun spewing anger at its own disappearance behind the storm.
Your joints cramp around your ballpoint, as if somehow your carpal tunnel might squeeze the ink upon the pages into the convenient shapes of the words out of grasp, might squeeze your brain into a shape that understands what you’re supposed to be reading.
Diagrams, paragraphs and descriptions vivid in definition clutter the boundless pages, so precise and logical in their existence, that they can’t help but bleed into an academic primordial soup in the face of your fatigue.
A groan emerges from your barren throat, your knees tucking up to huddle the books close to your heart as hunger clouds the vortex in your stomach. The silence of the library provides a serene bubble for your studying, the perfect environment for your labour, yet your brain seems to be gorging itself on procrastination and fog… why?
Just as you were about to reopen the dust-caked pages for your studies, soft humming brushes your ears at a distance, as a set of footsteps patter down the muffle of carpet.
The heat from your face drains to the sweat of your palms as you scramble back against the corner, shrinking yourself behind your book as you glance up to the gentle intruder. A soft exhale of amusement escapes the boy, tilting his head to glaze his eyes over your cocoon.
“You’re still here?”
A mumble clatters from your lips as your eyes dart around the room, your fingers clenching at the corners of a clothback. “No.”
Tim chuckles and nestles down, the tips of his sneakers gently wedged against yours as the citrus hues of the sky dance across the wisps and slithers of his caramel locks. His warm smile pierces your heart with a shot of adrenaline as you fiddle with the drawstrings of your jacket, tapping your shoe against the floor.
“You look rough, man.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Uh, yeah.” He chuckles and pulls your hood over your head, a hesitant chuckle eliciting from your throat as the warmth of his hand seeps in through his palm and into the crown of your head. “You look a little..”
Tim pauses, humming as he furrows his brow, pursing his lips in exaggeration.
“Rabid.”
“Dude!” You laugh and give his arm a light shove, his smile widening as he slumps back against the shelves, his eyes squinting in affectionate scrutiny.
“Seriously though.. How long have you been here for?”
“Well, how long has school been out?”
“Good point. Still though… Two and a half hours? When was the last time you caught a break?”
Your face blooms with heat as your clothes turn into a furnace, burning words on the tip of your tongue before they could fumble out into the open air.
Tim’s expression drops into a frown. “... Really?”
“Hey- I just put my books down! Right now! They’re not open! My eyes aren’t on them, I swear!”
“I meant before I came in here! When was the last time you got up, moved around, got something to eat- anything!”
Silence strangled your sentences as your eyes loomed down at the floor, glowering at your fingers picking at the carpet.
“... I’m not mad at you, you know.”
Of course you’re not. You think, your face sinking into the darkness of your knees.
A soothing hum rumbled from his throat as his fingers began to fiddle in ponderance, his eyes gliding down to his lap as his expression morphed into an aimless gaze of considerate neutrality.
“I just think you deserve to take better care of yourself. To be kind to yourself, even if you’re too tired to do so.”
Your eyes flit up, not at him, per say, more the fragments of details upon his face, the softness, the wonder, the flutter of his lashes and the wrinkles around his eyes. “You really think that?”
“Mm. It’s so fascinating how the human body persists through even its most dire states of disarray - starvation, fatigue, sickness, dirt, how every little cell, organism, the speckles of germs on your palms and the blood that spins around your brain, all culminate to the sole purpose of keeping you alive.”
He pauses, his eyes snipping into yours.
“But man.. You’ll only get stronger if you have the capacity necessary to learn from your pain. Making yourself hurt in hopes it’ll just hand you what you need to know never works, not from what I’ve learned. You only learn when you start to get to the other side, and then you get to look back and see what sorta mindset you were in, and what you can learn from that. And I think that’s beautiful, man.”
You paused, drinking in every drop of his dialogue as you felt the gelatine warmth of overwhelm build behind your eyes. You blinked, opening your mouth to speak, before a sigh drifted asunder from your mouth.
“Wh-… Yeah, I guess you’re right. But- still. I can’t just snap out of my own habits if they’ve been growing on me so long. I want to reward myself, but I physically don’t feel capable of giving myself one if I don’t feel deserving.”
“C’mon man, I do get where you’re coming from, but even if you were to treat yourself as machine, no robot runs without a form of sustenance. Believe me, I’d know that from the amount of times Moby’s crashed out on me. I mean-“
He leans forward, his breath wafting against your jaw as he pries the book from your clammy fingers, the pages thumping open to where your memory fizzled out. “It’s literally in what you’re reading. One of the eight characteristics on the criteria for a living organism is metabolism! The taking in and usage of energy so it can then be transcribed into nutrients! It’s basic biology!”
Your pupils focused in on the glow of passion in his eyes, the rising of his voice and the way the corners of his lips seemed to upturn into a beam.
“Meaning, if you don’t have any energy to respire, then can you even be classified as living at all? Your education is supposed to support your growth, not be the salt in your hydrostatic slug bones.”
A sigh can’t help but drift from your parted lips as his passion tugs your heartstrings into a smile, like some sort of smitten wooden puppet. A muppet, if you will; at least for him, that’s what you were.
“God, you’re such a nerd, but you’re not wrong. I lo- ahem, *admire*/ your nerdiness, anyways.” You cleared your throat.
“Well I don’t think I’d be Tim without it, to be honest.”
A beat of silence, your eyes tumbling down towards the pages like a magnet as your heart began to sink into the black tar of dread once more, fingers brushing against his own as you traced the outlines of the laminated ink, the aggressive formality of the academia burning holes into your lovesick fantasy.
.
“Alright man, give me… ten minutes, and I’ll try to explain to you as much as I can, but after that? We’re getting up, not just because you deserve it, but to let the thoughts sink in. Another thing I’ve learned from my studies is that cramming does not work for long term memory. You gotta let yourself breathe. Sound good to you?”
*
The ten minutes slipped through the fingers of time into a half of an hour, and soon you find yourself strolling along the empty corridors of the campus with Tim by your side, the elder raindrops from the bygone storm creating a mosaic on the glass to the murky twilight beyond. His knuckles find themselves coiling around wrist, fingers pressing into the pads of your palm as his eyes twinkle with an endless rambling of enthusiastic wisdom. The topics, at points, seemed to fizzle past your comprehension, but as long as his face still radiated within the grasp of your vision, all complaints would vanish from your mind.
“You see-” He paused to take another bite of his sandwich.
“You are right, dogs can only see in blue and yellow. BUT, humans are in no way superior in terms of vision - in fact, the reason there’s so many shades of green and blue on the colour wheel, is because cool colours are the colours seen by the human eye the most. But in reality!-” He swallowed another bite, turning his head to gawk at the landscape enveloping your left field of view.
“Many reptiles such as snakes and lizards can actually see in infrared, and- and some insects and birds can see in ultraviolet too! Isn’t that cool? Imagine all the colours beyond our comprehension that we’ve still yet to discover! Hell, imagine there being a creature that could like, see radio waves or X-rays or something- I mean, technically bats can already see a tiny bit of radiation signals with their infrared vision, but that’s only like, a millimetre so-”
“Do you think if we ever chose to see the whole light spectrum, we’d regret it?”
Tim’s waterfall of words halt to a stop in its flow, his eyes sliding around to meet yours as the smile drops into a thin line, the paper of his face creasing into a cluster at his eyebrows.
“What do you mean? Why’d you think we’d regret it?”
“We might see some shit, Tim. Shit we can’t bleach from our memory. Our innocence would come at the cost of knowledge.”
“That’s…- I- Hm. You’re not wrong, but-..” The words die on his tongue as his umber eyes fill with a subtle glimmer as they roll down to the twitch of your lips.
He swallows, “Say, if we saw everything, hypothetically, that’d mean we’d know everything too, right? I mean, they’re not mutually exclusive, obviously, but just for this scenario.”
… You nod.
“If we knew everything, all the horrors, atrocities, both manmade and cosmic, we’d know all about that, right? But if we knew everything, then we’d also know how to handle it all. If we knew everything, we wouldn’t just crumble under the weight of our knowledge, rather we’d know how to prosper in spite of it all, because we’d know everything. If we knew everything, then we’d know how to forge the human spirit into something resilient to the most horrible things in the world.”
“But then we wouldn’t be human anymore. No human is unbreakable, I think.”
“I know,” His eyes glide back up to yours once more as a smile begins to chisel itself into his face, unknowing whether he or yourself were the sculptor of such an expression, knowing merely that it dazzled like the sun that sliced open your vision after a long morning spent in the darkness of a curtained room.
“-which is why I think that even though we must still push for the further evolution of humanity and run on into the future head-first, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of our goals. Humanity could be coated in layers of the strongest armour, but I think we’re more fragile than we’d like to admit, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing, to be honest. It just means we have to be careful, but not so much that we’re, like, paralysed in fear all the time, you know?”
Your eyes unwound ajar, like the lens of the most vibrant camera being met with every colour on the visible (and invisible) light spectrum as your mouth slacked open in awe. Your eyes sprung off to the marble floor, before the uncontrollable hairball of words choked out of your larynx. “If you were a sculpture, I’d make sure to find the strongest armour for you.”
Your pupils shrunk to the circumference of a needle, as the searing fire of blood clawed up to your face once more, slamming your mouth shut before your nerveless palms had the chance to even twitch.
Tim’s head gave way to a tilt, a light snort from his nose as his lips twitched into a smirk. “... Really?”
“YEAH!” That time, your hand did actually lock onto your lips, sealing anymore yelps from your wounded little dog of a tongue.
“Like.. enchanted netherite from minecraft- or bedrock! I know bedrock armour technically doesn’t exist, since obviously it’d be way too OP for the game, but I’d mod it into the game out of spite just to make sure you were unbreakable.”
Laughter burst from his lips as his spine coiled over in affectionate ecstasy, hand coming up to wrap around your shoulders as he reeled you into his bubble of personal space.
“Dude.. I appreciate the sentiment, but- snort, I.. I can take care of myself, you know that? You don’t have to protect me.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever- but does the thrill of having a big, strong man scooping you up into his burly arms to save you away from the monsters of the world and whisk you off into the sunset not sound alluring to you?” Your voice took on a drawl of mockery as you poked his cheek.
He poked your arm in turn and grinned. “Uh huh.. Burly where, exactly?”
“Man, shut up!” You sputtered into laughter of your own as you swayed down the corridor, the freckles of warmth from the fading sunlight sprinkling your skin as you stumbled into the open air out front.
The rich moments of amusement passed as your laughter eventually drifted into the wind, painting the sky with skids of maroon and mulberry clouds dissolving into the fading periwinkles and prussians of the atmosphere. The warmth of enclosure and the constant comfort of the sun began to melt into the distance, as goosebumps prickled your bare biceps, your arms curling tighter around his waist as your cheek finds its way into the crook of his shoulder.
“Are you cold?” He quirks a brow as he leads you over to a bench.
“And tired.. Might as well be a grandpa at this point.”
“Hm.”
You heave over, slumping into the soaked, mossy wood as your fingertips sprinkled with flakes of dirt and grit, your irises wedged in limbo between him and the sienna skies.
“I think you’d make a pretty cool grandpa.”
“Oh really? And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Mmm, I dunno, I can imagine you rocking some of those fleece and flannel jackets, maybe even a cool cap.”
“Oh yeah? Well.. uh… I dunno, maybe you’re right, perhaps I could be a sick countryside grandpa.”
A pause. “Would you wanna be weird grandpas together one day?”
Your eyes snapped open as your eyes landed in lane with his own. You bit your lip, the planes of dry skin sinking around your teeth.
“... Yeah. Sounds fun. We could like… Grandpa all over the place.”
“Haha, yeah..” He hums and tugs your jacket further on you, his arm sneaking around your back as he playfully dunks your head back down.
“You should sleep. It’s been.. So nice, to spend time with you man, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made with your studies, but I can sense you’ve neglected your sleep again.”
The needy cotton of fatigue started furling around you like the fur of mold, inviting you down into a slumber, a muffle of a groan grumbling from your voice box as you began to lose your grip on the boy.
“I’ll be here when you wake up and here while you sleep. You don’t have to worry about being asleep in public. You don’t have to feel embarrassed for your harmless vulnerability.”
You nodded, and as the vibrant acrylic hues began to blur into blobs and dribbles of watercolour, and the crispness of the soundwaves began to drown into the sea of white noise, you found that the firmness of the warmth around you never ceased. Not the precision of his heartbeat, not the musk of old pages, not even the rhythmic whispers of his breath. The boy was anchored beside you, with you, around you.
And even though you were too wrapped up in your hibernation to catch it, not once did he release his tender touch. He never cared that you couldn’t comprehend it, not when his lips planted upon the crown of your head, and not when the word ‘Goodnight’ fell from his tongue. For in that moment, the world seemed to have decelerated its run down to a dawdle, growing branches for the cocoon of comfort and cordiality you shared that evening.