possible first scene (depending on what i decide on for pov) for the seanwhiteyok fic under the cut:
White hasn’t talked to anyone in over a month when he meets them.
His dad had apologised, eyes sad but dry, and his mother had avoided his gaze, and he’d told them there could never be any forgiveness for it, and he’d walked away, and he hadn’t spoken again. At some point, he’ll have to – job interviews aren’t generally conducted over email, he’d got lucky with a transcription-and-translation offer – but for now he doesn’t know how.
Feeling drained and defeated and empty, but the emptiness goes without saying, he makes his way to the water; that’s nonspecific, but it’s hard to think of it as “the spot where Black’s body washed up”.
He feels the broken end of the connection in his chest, and he wonders if that’s just grief, but he’d felt Black die and he knows what his parents had refused to admit directly – that Black hadn’t drowned. None of the family had been allowed to see the body, they’d said because of the bloating from the water, but he’d place a bet it would be because of whatever had crushed Black’s head like that. Whoever had chased him.
It wasn’t the first time White had felt him being chased, that had come the very first night in Thailand – it had come again several weeks later, and again, and again, and then the last time, and the thing was Black hadn’t felt any more panicked the last time than the first.
He hadn’t known he was out of time to find him.
Because that feels like the worst thing but also the only consolation White has, the fact that he’d tried to find him. He’d begged his father for Black’s contact details, for their mother’s, and when that hadn’t worked he’d once again tried online snooping, he’d gone to everyone who even vaguely remembered him from before but none of them had known a thing, even Todd only knowing that he’d, at one point, been studying law.
Todd’s the only person he feels guilty about not being able to talk to – he’d been the only other person crying.
Crying, which is what White’s doing now as he stares at the water Black didn’t die in.
The water the connection didn’t draw White to.
Because the connection isn’t there anymore.
Tears stream down his face, but he doesn’t sob or make a sound; that’s not really how White cries. It had been one of the first things to tip their parents off about the connection although they hadn’t admitted it for years, the way White would be crying in complete silence before Black would abandon any other task to go to White’s side and-
God, what had Black’s task been?
He doesn’t know, and it kills him that his mother probably does and wouldn’t say. White had begged her.
Silently crying, silently wondering, silently wishing, White can hear the water and the traffic and the thudding noises of people at work, but nothing that’s for or about him; that’s the most he can handle these days.
So, of course, that’s when he meets them.