People May Surprise You PV Levi Drakos

Within bland strings of godly, complacent days, there were opposites. Not lowly hours of lacking self esteem and hopeless filmy dreams, but times when the eldritch feeling caught up with him, and an incomprehensible exhaustion became a consequence not of accomplishment but of existence at all. It was on these days Levi felt less than human, more like a sound, traveling in gossamer waves as an echo of what used to be. It was the early evening, and his guitar case’s rugged strap was scraping his neck like a too-tight shirt collar. It weighed heavily on his back, both the instrument itself and the sheet of neglect that had covered it in the months since its last touch. The boy’s eyelids took the brunt, forcing themselves closed and wandering the corridors by the memory of rusted muscles which grappled at the hall's side for the right door.

He’d missed playing. Or, realistically, he missed the phantom that followed desperately where Mercy went, the ghost of his finest rhapsody, of his Frost embodiment. She lived most within the walls of the Rehearsal Room, where her ethereal residue remained in trace amounts scattered on the floor. Her spirit danced around the domed ceiling, left icy handprints on the arched glass, and was the reason the chandelier occasionally shuffled as though an outdoor wind was whistling through its candlelit details. Time was nothing there, and that was how she survived, sharing her art with the stone wall, comparing it to a winter midnight and a stood-up date and the scent of vanilla. Levi had gone too long without that humanizing touch, and he’d chase it again and again, but to make her shadow more than a late-night whisper in his ear, he needed to be the boy she loved in the first place just one more time.

Crawling back to her after his recent horrors was an attempt to save himself from drowning. A shirt burning in a sink, heat melting his mask at its fleshy seams, a fire crackling and twirling in sun-shaded ripples in the pupils of his hazel eyes, and still his lungs swelled with a volume of salty water. The pressure in his chest wasn’t of a broken heart but because he could no longer breathe, instead swarmed in an unhappy, grisly ocean of reality. He’d been snagged on one of Santario’s sharp rocks, a mile from the shore, and it would scrape and tear at the indentation in his collarbone. Maybe part of him hoped a ballad would suture that aged wound where it kept bleeding every night onto his silk-cased pillow.

Now just outside the oaken doors, able to hear the windy breaths and lost kisses of his fond memory, he watched a light seep through the crack between the barely ajar entrance. Gold, cast across the hallway like a beam of wealth and guidance, shining against the corridor’s wall before gliding up and evaporating, leaving a dull gray tone. This continued in rippling cycles, the illumination would come and go as though unsure of itself, and his pale ringed fingers cupped around the door’s edge and pulled it further open. Inside was not his apparition, but her ashes, as a flame not contained in a sink and mauling a tacky button-up had invaded and scorned the memorial. A boy stood in the room’s center, an array of equipment sprawled out nearby, toying with death and bites and reactions he couldn’t begin to understand.

Protective instincts retrieved Mercy from his shoulder, propping the dusty black case against the corner. Moments were wasted immersed in the performance, uncertain how to interrupt; disturbing a boy who swayed in an inferno housed uncomfortable similarities to waking a sleepwalker. It was talent, but idiotic, and he could see his rhapsody’s fiery hair shriveling in the core of the blaze. Her ghost was chased to hell, and the room was rendered a mere miracle of architecture. His only dose of sentimentality had been burned before his eyes, and a tinge of sadness twirled at his right hand’s silver ring before turning to quelled embers itself. Levi stayed silently watching in this corner, waiting to be noticed by his entertainer, then perhaps he’d throw a galleon into the older boy’s hat and they’d part ways, one with a nurtured savior complex and the other marginally—meaninglessly—richer.

The fire was like an untamed animal Jack had at the end of a short leash. He had to constantly leap and dodge to keep just out of its reach while simultaneously harnessing it within the area of his control. It bit and hissed and at times he felt more like a matador than a dancer, stepping out of his choreography every so often to avoid being burned. He still had nowhere near the grace or speed that Ruka had, but Ruka seemed to have been born to fire dance. Ruka didn't seemed afraid to be bitten and that might have been why the fire respected him. On the other hand, it still seemed to smell Jack's fear.

With the shadows frequently darting about him like living things, it took Jack a while to notice that he soon wasn't the only one in the room. When he did, he swore, accidentally catching one of his fire sticks by its lit end so that he dropped it. Moving quickly, he darted to fling a thick blanket upon the fallen fire so as to cut off its oxygen and extinguish the flames. With a sigh, Jack flopped to the floor to lie flat on his back. He held his hand above his head and tried to examine his new burn in the remaining light.

"Hello," he called, not looking away from his palm. "I didn't realize I was putting on a show. Can I help you?"

@Levi Drakos