[crow]

“I like you,” he says.

It’s spring. They’re both fourteen, sitting outside on a bench. Heat is dressed in leathers, tossing peas into the pond at the congregation of ducks. There’s a faint scowl on his face, like there has been lately, all the time. It’s getting to be that Reaper can’t really remember how he looks without it, except younger.

“Yeah?” he says. For a heart-dropping moment, Reaper’s brain scrambles to make meaning from it, thinking it’s the only response he’s going to get. It isn’t. It just takes a moment for the words to register, and then Heat is looking up at him, and he’s beginning to wonder if the nonchalant ‘yeah’ wasn’t the better option.

He isn’t sure what to expect. What he wanted. What he is sure of is that Heat looks confused, and that there was definitely a flush creeping up his own neck.

[crow]

The laugh bubbles up his throat before he can stop it, his voice nervous and high. “Oh, um. Y’know. April Fools!” he says, and immediately wants to thrash himself. Even if it sounded convincing, which it doesn’t, it’s the coward’s way out. But that’s who he is, isn’t it? Reaper, useless pretty boy, pure disappointment from the minute he opens his mouth. Before that, even. The one who screams so hard at the horror flicks that the rest of his friends aren’t scared anymore, they’re laughing so hard. No way he’d have the guts to confess. He doesn’t know what possessed him to say something like that in the first place.

Heat doesn’t say anything. He keeps staring, and Reaper feels like those eyes are going to bore right through him, melt him into a puddle of his own nerves and shame. This was, thankfully, not one of Heat’s powers. He’d be horrifying if it was. Still, laid bare like this, it was all he could do to keep smiling, not to squirm.

[crow]

It’s a relief when Heat smiles back, one corner of his mouth quirked up in his wry lop-sided grin, giving way to a soft huff of laughter. “What the hell, man,” he says. “It’s not even funny.”

“Y-Yeah,” Reaper says. He looks down at the immaculate toes of his high-tops. Heat’s attention was already returning to the ducks. He reaches into the bag of peas, tosses them another handful, smiles as he watches them, and it feels like it’s supposed to again: two boys at a park, doing nothing in particular.

Reaper doesn’t know whether to feel disappointed.

[crow]

He has no idea how it started. By the time he realized what was happening, he was already in too deep, some event horizon crossed without ever being aware of its existence. It was another mundane sort of day, but he remembers the details like they were branded into his skin: the late summer sunshine, the smell of cut grass, the peanut butter underneath his fingernails and staining his best friend’s chin. He remembers looking at Heat, at the way he brushed the smudge brusquely off with the back of his hand, and thinking, idly, that he probably couldn’t live without him.

That was years ago, and they were children. The thought of Heat being gone was absurd, of course. He wasn’t scared--- not of that, at least. But it felt like a significant epiphany even then, before he had really known all the details and connotations of what it was like to be in love with someone you knew.

[crow]

If you had asked him then, he would have said, of course he knew what love was. Didn’t everyone? All those movies, and the way Uncle Kismet looked at Uncle Proph... That kind of thing. (His own mother had never married, and he didn’t know who his father was, but that was neither here nor there. He didn’t need a nuclear family to figure out something simple like that.) It was going to happen to him too, someday, probably. But that idea and this, the boy next to him, had felt like completely different matters.

Technically they’re still children now, though sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. Increasingly, things are complicated: there are kids at school who would beat you up if you were gay, for one. There are kids who would beat Reaper up for all sorts of reasons. And didn’t, because he was friends with Desi, but giving them one more reason still doesn’t seem like a smart idea.

[crow]

More concerningly, it no longer seems so certain that Heat won’t just up and disappear one of these days. He’d been skipping school on and off for a while now, for one. His family is worried, though mostly his father leaves him alone. His sister is the one who gets into rows with him, and Reaper always knows when they’ve had one; Heat sulks for days, sometimes showing up in the middle of the night by crawling through Reaper’s window. It makes him wonder whether this--- the ever-present scowl, the sense of growing distance--- was that, or...

He’s staring, he realizes. He is about to look away, to find some excuse to stammer half-heartedly out, when Heat says something that makes him stare all the harder.

“I think I’m going to run away from home.”

[crow]

He phrases it so casually. He’s still feeding the ducks, his hand like slow and well-oiled clockwork, his gaze almost ponderous as he watches them eat. As if he hadn’t just said--- Run away from home. The words play on repeat inside Reaper’s head, as if by repetition they could make themselves understood, as if he could unravel the absurdity of it to some hidden truth beneath. Run away from home. Something that Reaper could never imagine, not in a million years. Not for himself, anyway.

But not... not for Heat, maybe. Not for Heat, who has never been afraid of anything, not really. Not horror movies, not bullies, not even the idea that his dad would kick his ass. He isn’t anything like Reaper, whose fears could probably have filled a small encyclopedia. And his relationship with his dad is nothing like what Reaper had with his own mother, as they both knew all too well. Whereas Reaper could only see himself getting accosted by a million different horrors if he stepped outside the shelter of his small suburban life, he could picture Heat taking on those shadowy threats and coming out the victor. Really, it’s hard to picture him cowering in an alley and begging his sister to come fetch him home.

[crow]

He doesn’t know what to say.

“April fools,” says Heat, in that soft half-laughing voice, fuzzy with the beginnings of breaking. He’s smiling, but Reaper finds he doesn’t believe him. He doesn’t think this is a joke. But there’s no good way to say it, not without it coming out another accusation, and he knows from watching Ember talk to Heat that this wouldn’t work. In the absence of any other options, he laughs. (His own voice is still high, clear and indisputably high, just as his face is still soft and fine-featured. It would go like that.)

“Yours isn’t funny either,” he says. Heat laughs harder at that. Reaper listens to the sound of it and thinks, it’s this that’s different now, from how they were before. Weren’t best friends supposed to be able to tell each other everything?

He hesitates, because it’s what he does, but he says it anyway. “I’ll... keep my window open for you, if you do.”

[crow]

Heat looks up at that, startled. Reaper keeps going, because opening his mouth and sticking his foot in it is what he does best, once he gets a head start. “I mean, I think it’s stupid, but Ember already told you that, right? So I guess when things are bad, I’d feel better knowing you had somewhere to go. And... I won’t say anything if you don’t want me to. My mom won’t either.” This is more convincing than even trying to convince Heat that his mother won’t know, because even if Reaper didn’t tell her, she’d know. Reaper’s mother was like that. Fortunately, he felt pretty reasonably confident that he was right, and she wouldn’t say anything, if it came to that.

A sigh goes up beside him. “You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?” But he knows his best friend’s tells too--- they’d known each other too long--- and he smiles, relieved. This is the language he knows, where everything is easy. Heat has, after all, never been one for open displays of affection.

[crow]

“I don’t know why we’re even friends,” he says, flippant. Heat laughs at that too, nudges him in the shoulder.

“Please. You’d miss me too much,” he said.

Yes, thought Reaper. He was going to miss him when he did run away too, but now wasn’t the time to say that. Reaper knew too well about the kinds of words that weighed people down. Besides, he wasn’t about to give Heat the satisfaction of hearing him say it.

“Give me some of that,” he said instead, grabbing himself a handful of peas.

It was just the two of them, on a Sunday afternoon, doing nothing in particular. And if things were going to change, then Reaper wanted to hang onto this feeling for as long as he could.