WILLING AND ABLE, with @starrygze
today was a pleasantly warm day, and it has turned into a pleasantly cool night. doha likes this part of the year the most, when the weather temporarily lets go of extremes. it never lasts long enough.
he's sitting on a swing beside jian, shoes pushing against the ground to rock back and forth slightly. he can see to the edge of the park property, but everything else is lost in the night. it's comforting to be here with her and no one else; much better than the alternative of being home, with nobody at all. it doesn't matter that he's tired. he'd fight off the heaviest of eyelids to stretch time out with her.
he's gripping cool metal swing chains in each hand, and his head is tilted to the side, leaned against a clenched fist. close enough to the chain to smell the rust. it reminds him of childhood.
"there was this time when i was a kid," he starts, breaking the comfortable silence, "that my parents were going to take my siblings and me to an arcade that we'd all been begging to go to, but they took us to a park first to get our energy out so we wouldn't be too crazy in the arcade, i guess. i was pushing my sister on the swing and she tried to jump out, but she jumped at a weird time and landed in this little puddle of mud, so she didn't want to go to the arcade anymore. my parents offered to buy her new pants at a store so we could still go, but she refused. we just went home instead, and she was in a bad mood all day. we called her 'mud' for months after that. we even got some other kids at school in on it." he leaves out the detail that it was an arcade he'd been begging to go to, and that it happened on his birthday. he doesn't tell it as a complaint, or as a bad memory—he's smiling a little and it carries over to his tone, fondly recalling something from the past, something the smell of rust reminded him of.
he exhales slowly. he's looking straight ahead, into the far darkness. "probably kind of mean of us, in retrospect." he turns his head to look at her, smiling just a little. "i don't think i appreciated my siblings enough until i moved here. i liked playing pretend as an only child when i'd visit my aunt back then, but now that i live here, i kind of miss them, you know?"
he glances up at the sky, pondering, and then looks back at her. "what was it like for you, getting to grow up here?"







