Body Reaction | Rover | This is Our Story
Your name is Rover and you are fifteen years old. For whatever reason, you are still alive—despite your best efforts at being anything but, you wake each time you fall asleep.
You should’ve died four deaths ago.
In your spare time, you remember the facts to keep you sane: you were born in Seattle Washington, you grew up sleeping on spare couches and wrestling for your bathroom and food rights. You have debts to pay. You have places to see. You have promises to keep. You accepted your invitation under a spotlight in front of a cheering crowd, and after the long and tearful goodbyes you find yourself on a plane, and then a train, and then pacing around in circles around a fire pit, cellphone raised to the sky.
For him, your name is Red.
You trip over him. You find it hilarious. In weeks to come you will look back on how ironic it was that he was the one to pull you to the ground, but for now your laugh sounds like butterfly wings in lightness. He reminds you of another friend, and perhaps that’s why you initially want to see him again. You notice his smile does not look well-worn, so you wave your arms and crack some jokes and beam each time you see it work its way back on his lips. Before you dart off, you hand over a bubble blower, half used, so people will spot him next time he’s lounging on the ground.
You send him a letter ten minutes later. Testing, testing! No Wi-Fi found yet!
When you see him next the sky is dotted with silver and you’re both bathed in moonlight. You nudge him over with your elbow and lie down in the spot next to him after he tells you the stars look like stranger to him, sparing sideways glances at him to shoot grins. You could teach him the name of every star if he wanted. You wouldn’t mind talking of stories until he drifted off beside you.
He’s working hard, you tell anyone that tries to strike conversation with him while he dozes off, adorning him with the latest watermelon fashion. The helmet you'd placed on his head shields him from any lights, the sword you’d carved stays standing upright when tucked in the crook of his elbow. You snicker whenever he grunts out a well-timed comment to the table conversation. When the night is done you walk him back to his dorm and thank him for letting you drag him along. Thank him for coming back when he leaves for a break with his other friends.
Around now you realize you know him the best, though your interactions thus far have only ever been soaking in the other's presence. You like his smile and his voice and the feather-like bangs that peek out from his hat. He reminds you that there is a ground somewhere that he’s standing on, and that there is logical-thinking along with it. You sit next to him by the pond and promise to him you’ll be careful, if in turn he is careful. You don’t believe there is anything to be careful about, because nothing will ever happen to either of you.
That wouldn’t make sense.
He is who you want to see when you feel like you’re going insane, so you sit and wait until dawn, curled up outside the front of his dorm. When he finds you you feel as frantic as a bird—fidgeting and stuttering and begging him not to fall asleep out there, he is not fast enough, something will happen. You were wrong, you think, there is something out there that could get you and hurt you. Get him and hurt him. You need him to understand something you aren’t entirely sure of yourself, you need him to get what you feel when you still can't put words to it. He knows what to say and what to do and your wings stop fluttering. You sit with him for a long time.
You do not want anything to happen to this boy, but you don’t realize the extent of that until a week later, finding him hunched over the same water’s edge you were with him when you both swore you’d be careful. His name sounds like you’re holding it like glass when you say it, and when he turns he looks caught in headlights, blood smeared and dripping down his face and clothes and arms. Your lungs are stinging before you register you’re not breathing.
You cannot think straight or see clearly but one second you’re staring at Yutaka’s broken face and the next brown eyes gaze down at you in concern. You say you need his help, you need his help, it’ll all be okay if he helps, but when you get there there is only screaming—your screaming—and his arms and his voice and him. He tells you over and over and over again that he knows it was just a mistake, that he knows you didn’t mean to, and you honestly wish you could skip the trial and come back to your execution at the end, just sit there with your face buried in his neck instead.
In weeks to come you will find yourself fighting against your lungs and heart a lot more. You will find yourself curled into his arms more often than not, your hand a magnet to his sleeve or hand or hair. Sometimes it’s him that’s crying but most of the time it’s you. He coughs a lot but you never, ever tell him how much that starts to scare you. You grow fond of the sound his heart and laugh, and though you might not say it aloud you could spend hours doing nothing but sitting with him.
(Between chaos you find out he knows how to make root beer out of roots and he’s good at skipping stones. He likes drawing jackalopes. He is not well. He prefers the dawn. He’s three years older than you. He is not well. He would pick the power of invisibility or the ability to stop time if he could. Neither of your genes were kind to you both. He’s better than you at Monopoly. Most of his clothes are from the brand he works with. You both have unhappy stories to your scars.)
Your life strips away after every death, after every friend slips through your fingers instead of yourself slipping through theirs, but it’s alright when you are with him. He is the bayou to your sea, the beacon of light through your darkness. For a little while, by his side, those friends are just names—flat and empty and meaningless.
Compared to him they are meaningless.
You believed with every ounce of your being this day would never come.
Rover’s hand was cold. While he hadn’t touched Kayoko’s neck for all too long, he still felt tough and rubbery skin on his fingertips no matter the amount of times he rubbed his hand up and down his sleeve. He spent the elevator ride focusing part on his hand, part on his breath swirling in gentle clouds in front of his face. The pacing of breath felt precise, deliberate—a one-two step where he was instructing himself to breathe calmly.
It’ll be okay. Nothing could ever take him. It’ll be okay.
(It'll—he was—even though—)
By the time the lift lurched to a shuddering halt at the forest floor, droplets were rolling down his cheeks and dripping of his chin in soft platters on his sweater. His breath hitched every other second, though for the most part his face was placid, calm.
(—even though—that extra notification that followed—who else would it—?)
It took the builder a very long time to will his feet to move, to urge himself in forward steps off the grated platform and towards the vegetable garden. There wasn’t much left of their class to really form a crowd around the body in the first place, but in his delay with the elevator, things had cleared out enough that Rover only needed to lift his eyes up from the ground to meet gazes with Haku.
(The other day, on your way out of his dorm, the words I love you slip off your tongue. Haku’s face flushes faster than you’d ever seen it before, his eyes, and your own, going wide in the silence that comes to pass afterwards. You close the door seconds after, backing up quickly and retreating back to your own dorm in order to walk yourself right into the shower and soak yourself with freezing water. If—if the pipes hadn’t been frozen solid. Instead you groan, red-faced and hot, into a corner.)
(These are your last words to him.)
Rover’s hand clamped over his mouth in lightning bolt speed, possibly in hopes to either muffle a loud cry or hold down a dry heave—hard to tell, but it did little to help either.
(You want to say it a thousand times over now. Every second of every day and every breath Haku would ever take, that you would have lived without the goddamn sun for the rest of your life if it meant he would continue to stay by your side.)
Rover’s back collided with a tree, air forcing its way out of his lungs in a raspy gasp, another heave, and coughing fit—trying to swallow down air like he was chugging a drink.
Rover did not blink, did not look away, could not blind, could not look away—his eyes only found way to break from Haku’s glassy stare when things got too blurry to make out. He found himself sitting on the ground when he next opened his eyes, still trying to scramble back despite being pressed against a tree trunk, pupils shrunk and flitting like a humming bird over Haku’s head, and arms, and shirt, and the blood trailing down his face and soaking through his shirt and the gashes the pool of red he was lying in and Rover could still hear his heartbeat pounding slowly in his head from when he hugged him goodbye last, still felt his chin tuck on the top on his head and his arms cling tighter to him than Rover was himself, still—
When he started sobbing he didn’t know, but the sound of his cries racking through his tiny form would’ve been loud enough to scare away birds had there been any around. His eyes squeezed shut and he crumbled in on himself, shoulders drawing inward and head ducking down, some messy combination of coughing and sobbing tearing his throat and lungs raw.
(You know it’s less about the state of his body, you know that isn’t what’s registering for you right now—it is his absence that will come from this moment on.)
(There are things you need to show him still, constellations you need to teach him, places you wanted to take him, Haku was—you needed—you couldn't—!!
—no, no no no, this, this was, Haku didn’t get it—did he ever get it?—would he ever get it now?—you never told him—that you were only ever —because he was with you.)
More than anything, Rover wanted Haku’s comfort for Haku’s damn dead body, and thinking of that brought waves of pain that felt like how he might imagine getting stabbed in the chest would be like, and then twisted around and around and around like he was a keyhole the key didn’t quite fit in—far worse than any other vanishing friend before this.
To.. run, to hide, to wait until the mayor found him and shot him dead because he refused to get up unless Haku was the one that asked him to come. Because damn right he was child, and he would kick and scream and throw things before anyone could make him go to this fucking trial.
Rover needed to go, now, to his room, to Haku’s room to—to the notification—
And Rover was, with his hand still over his mouth and his head ducked down as to not see him, as always, as always—Rover was turning on his heels and running.
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