Chapter Text
“Hey,” he says. “I think I’m in some sort of time loop.”
Riz gives Fabian one cutting glance, as though it’s all he deserves, and gathers his books under his arm to start off down the hall. “Yeah, fucking hilarious.”
Fabian follows doggedly. “I- please, I’m serious. I keep living this Friday over and over again. I think it’s been months of just this Friday, Riz, you have to believe me.”
There’s a slight falter in his walking rhythm. “I didn’t know you knew my name.”
Fabian could cry. “I know,” he says, his voice a little breathless, “you say that every time.”
Outside of the classroom, the hallways are alive with the ebb and flow of people on their way, joking and gossiping and frantically scribbling last-minute answers into their homework. Only the two of them stand stagnant as Riz turns and affixes Fabian with a grim look. “Okay, I’ll bite. You’re in a time loop, what do I have to do with it?”
Fabian stops, mouth agape, and tries to think of something to say. Because although it’s the truth, Fabian really doesn’t want this to just be another day where he tells Riz that he’s going to die. He knows how that plays out. So he stands there, and Riz waits patiently for a reply before realizing that none is coming. “Great,” he says, mouth set in a thin line. “Good talk. Nice to meet you.”
Riz stalks off down the hallway, a tight draw to his back. Fabian, for a moment, stands and watches him go. But he can’t do that, can’t waste another day, so he goes after him. Riz is quick and evasive, weaving through the passing students without a second thought, and Fabian has to body through a few freshmen to follow.
At the threshold of his classroom, Riz pauses, catches Fabian in his periphery, and says, “god, you’re really not going to let it go. I have class,” he jerks his head towards the door, “if you’ll let me.”
“You have your AP solesian government test now,” Fabian tells him. “I know.”
Riz’s brow furrows, but he turns and leaves anyway.
Fabian waits.
He has no need to go to class. He could probably recite it from memory at this point. So he sits on the windowsill across the hall, trying to learn to flip a dagger and catch it in one hand. It doesn’t go very well. If everything about his life were different, he would be worried about the cuts on his fingers and the small slices all up and down the legs of his pants, but he’s not. Tomorrow everything will be back as usual.
At the ringing of the bell, Fabian waits outside the door for Riz, who jumps when he sees him. “Fucking hell,” he says, clutching his heart. “Are you going to stalk me all day?”
Fabian shrugs. “Until you believe me.”
There, in the middle of the crowded hallway, Riz sucks in his lower lip and looks Fabian up and down. Analyzing him; studying him. I’m trying to figure you out, Riz had said, last night in the long-cast shadow of Aguefort’s office.
People pass by, chatting and laughing. Fabian’s skin feels too tight.
“Okay,” says Riz, folding his arms in front of him, hip cocked to one side. “You have my attention.”
“Great,” Fabian says. “Can we talk somewhere else?”
As they walk, neither quite leading the way, Riz keeps looking back to watch Fabian, as if he doesn’t quite believe he’s still there. As if it’s some sort of prank, to lead him out somewhere and leave him to the mercy of the bloodrush bullies. Fabian thinks that it would be a very convoluted prank if so, and not one that his fellow Owlbears would be liable to pull off.
When they turn the corner by the cafeteria, Riz breaks the silence and says, “are you going to do the thing where you walk around and point out all the things that happen before they happen?”
“What?”
Riz points at a spot in the hallway where two students are flirtatiously touching each others’ arms. “Like in movies. You know, a piano falls there, somebody says something memorable there, someone bumps into you and says ‘watch where you’re going, punk!’”
“Uh. Well. The day doesn’t really happen in a series of discrete events like that. Also, why would there be a piano falling in the middle of the school?”
Riz shrugs, twitchy and awkward. “I mean, I guess I figured that if the universe is already bending the rules enough to do a time loop, they can at least get a piano falling in there.”
Students file into their classrooms; around them doors close as the next period begins. Riz looks around nervously, like he’s worried he might get busted for cutting at any moment. They wander aimlessly through the now-empty halls, neither quite wanting to be too forward.
“Are you going to do the thing where you say what I’m going to say before I say it?”
“What?” Fabian says, at the same time as Riz says, “banana split.”
“You’re not very good at this,” Riz says.
“Well, I mean, I- you do say some of the same things sometimes.” Fabian frowns. “Like- can I talk to you outside?”
Riz cocks an eyebrow.
“What, so you and your buddies can beat me up behind the dumpsters?” Fabian says, trying to anticipate, at the same time as Riz says, “but we’re already talking now.”
“Why would you think I wanted to beat you up?” Riz asks.
Fabian’s head hurts. “No, you think that I’m going to beat you up.”
“Oh,” Riz says, drawing back. “What are you usually doing to make me think you’re going to beat me up?”
“I don’t know,” Fabian says, exasperated. “Don’t ask me.”
They end up in the music hallway, between the long rows of barely soundproof practice rooms, where everyone is either in class or too involved in their own bardic activities to pay any attention to them. At the end of the hall, a water genasi girl seems to have entered a meditative state as she drones the endless verses of some horrible ballad.
“Okay,” Riz says, feet squared, drawing up all of his height in some misguided attempt to look confident. “So you can’t tell me what’s going to happen before it happens, one of, I will say, the quintessential proofs of a time loop. So why should I believe you?”
Fabian gestures weakly at the bard in the corner, still singing her monotone dirge. “There’s bizarre shit happening all the time here, why wouldn’t you believe me?”
“Even if- if- I believe you, you clearly have never talked to me about it before, or you would know the secret code.” He raises an eyebrow at Fabian, as if encouraging him to remember something. When Fabian doesn’t say anything, he frowns. “I made a secret code, for if I’m ever in a time loop. And you don’t know it, so I’m not inclined to believe you.”
“Well, I’ve never told anyone about the time loop before today,” Fabian says. It sounds pathetic the moment it leaves his mouth. Riz checks his watch. “Can I hear the code?”
Riz purses his lips and eyes Fabian for a long, excruciating moment. His gaze is penetrating and contemptuous. “No,” he says at long last.
A laugh escapes Fabian. He sinks down into a folding chair outside of one of the practice rooms, the old pinned-up audition sides for the spring musical fluttering on the wall behind him as he moves. “God,” he sighs. His mouth keeps pulling up, even though he doesn’t feel like smiling. Maybe he’s going hysterical. “Every day I try and talk to you, and you really don’t make it easy.”
He had cried in front of Aelwyn last night. He had cried in front of Aelwyn and tried- wanted- to kiss Riz. He wasn’t lying when he said that he couldn’t do it anymore. The idea that this might be forever, this nightmare, fills Fabian with such a concentrated sense of despair that it threatens to destroy him. Riz stands, fidgeting with the handle of his briefcase, shuffling from side to side. The faux-confident posturing is gone. He checks his watch once more.
“Why are you still here?” Fabian asks. There’s a bitterness coating his tongue that colors his words. “If you don’t believe me.”
Riz fidgets. “Well, I don’t-” he stops, wets his lips, and looks down at his shoes, the sensible loafers that he wears every day. Or every Friday, at least. Fabian had never noticed his shoes before this Friday. He had never really noticed anything about him before. But Riz, the one that Fabian notices all the time now, avoids Fabian’s eyes and mumbles, “you seem… desperate.”
Fabian laughs once more. He doesn’t mean to. “I know your class schedule,” he says. The words slip from his mouth without intention. “I know that you don’t have a date to prom tonight, but you’re going anyway. I know that you sit in the front of the bus and the left latch of your briefcase sticks. And I’m not just stalking you, because I also know that you’ve never gone to the movies during the daytime, and you want to be an old-school private eye, and you know first aid, the non-magical kind, and you get kind of sad when you smoke weed.”
Riz’s lips part, just slightly, as he takes this in. Fabian, as always, feels guily about how he’s going about everything. After a long, unbearable moment, Riz says, “I’ve never smoked weed.”
“Well, not-” Fabian twirls a finger in the air- “this time around. But we did, once.”
The bard makes it through three verses before Riz speaks again. “Every day,” he says, sounding a bit dazed. “You talk to me every day?”
Fabian nods. It’s all he can do.
“Okay,” Riz announces. “I believe you.”
Well.
It’s one problem squared away, but it leaves Fabian with the much greater problem: what on earth to actually do about any of this. His mouth is very dry. There must be a water fountain in the music hallway, surely. Is it appropriate, in such a high-stakes moment, to get up and look for a water fountain?
Riz shuffles his feet, but there’s a slight gleam of humor in his eyes, like there’s a private joke he’s telling himself. “What do we do, you know, together in the time loop?”
“Whatever we want. Usually we catch a movie.” Fabian glances at the clock and finds that it’s later than he expected. A lot of the day disappears if he actually goes to class, apparently. At Riz’s incredulous frown, he explains, “you’re not very good at coming up with ideas.”
“Au contraire,” Riz says, like a nerd. And, as if to compound on his nerdiness, he goes rummaging through his briefcase, pulling out a keyring with a wicked smile. “Swiped the janitor’s keys, made copies at the hardware store in town, put them back before anybody noticed. I got thirty points of extra credit in rogue class for it.”
“Shit,” Fabian says. “And the teacher hasn’t made you give them back?”
Riz shrugs, his twitchy gestures and proud grin. “Nobody knows where she is, how would she come and take them from me?”
Fabian can’t argue with that. And Riz is dying, so he’s not going to try. Instead, he lets himself follow Riz without questioning, past busy classrooms and the jangling pots and pans of the cafeteria preparing for lunch.
Riz throws glances back over his shoulder. Fabian walks slowly, hands in his pockets, and tries to approximate a friendly smile.
He trails Riz through the athletic wing, not asking questions, and finds himself in the darkened, empty pool.
It’s a big, cavernous room, one of the many parts of Aguefort that don’t seem to fit into the exterior footprint of the school. Pointing on a map, Fabian wouldn’t be able to locate the pool. But he knows it’s there, because he’s standing in it now. The white-painted ceiling beams lattice above them, the blue water rippling just so with the gentle propulsion of the filters. Riz stands, hands in the pockets of his sensible slacks, taking it all in.
“It always seemed like a real teen movie thing to do,” Riz says. “Sneak into the pool. And hey-” he shoots a sideways grin over at Fabian- “time loop, right?”
Fabian considers, briefly, asking Riz why he had never brought up his stolen keyring before. But if he did that then he would have to spill the beans about the whole dying thing, and it’s this hesitation that brings Fabian to the conclusion that maybe it had never come up because Riz hadn’t wanted to spend his last days alive at school.
That’s how he got into the principal’s office, he figures. He had just assumed that Riz was a great lockpick, or that Aguefort was a really freewheeling guy.
Fabian watches as Riz neatly lays aside his shoes and socks and nearly has a heart attack as he goes to unbuckle his belt, suddenly overcome with the impossible question of what the appropriate state of undress is for swimming with a near-stranger in the middle of the school day. A near-stranger he tried to kiss last night.
But he doesn’t have to worry about it for long because Riz puts his belt beside his shoes and jumps in without a second thought, slacks and all.
He surfaces with a smile, pushing his wet hair off of his face. “You coming in?”
And hell, it’s something that Fabian hasn’t done yet on this godforsaken Friday, so he kicks off his shoes, puts his letter jacket to the side, and dives.
Instantly his pants feel like ten-pound weights and his tank top suctions to his body like a second skin. It’s not comfortable, but it’s a unique experience, which is all that Fabian ever craves anymore.
The water is cool and overly chlorinated, the smell of the air thick with it.
Riz ducks under the surface and swims the length of the pool and back, ungraceful strokes that propel him forward nonetheless. Fabian watches his rippling shape pass by, lean freckled arms and twisting black-clad legs. He pops up next to Fabian, takes a great gasping breath, and plunges back under.
When he comes back up, he’s got a golden hoop earring between two fingers. “Lost and found,” he says, and swims over to deposit it on the diving board.
They float in the half-lit pool, clothes billowing around them, almost weightless. The high windows let in the late morning sunlight.
It’s weird. Fabian’s been inside of the Aguefort pool complex before once or twice, but always while there were other people there, during gym class or at swim meets, when chatter and water splashing bounce off the walls in a cacophony. But now it’s dark and abandoned, just the two of them where they shouldn’t be. The cuts on his fingers, where he had tried and failed to catch the blunt handle of his pocketknife, sting in the chemical water. He breathes through the pain; after three breaths, it doesn’t bother him as much.
Fabian treads water and tries not to let his clothes bog him down. “My papa didn’t want me to learn to swim,” he says, for no discernable reason. “Bad luck and all that. Cathilda took me to lessons in secret for three months when I was nine.”
In the strange light, Riz tilts his head, examines him.
“I thought you’d be a dick,” Riz muses, legs wheeling under the water. “You’re kind of weird. Who’s Cathilda?”
“My maid. I haven’t been a dick to you in class, have I?”
“No, mostly it’s just the bloodrush guys. But the fact that you can’t remember if you’ve done anything dickish is sort of dickish in itself, so.”
“Sorry.”
Riz hums in acknowledgment and ducks his head beneath the water, holding himself under for a few seconds before emerging with a shake of wet hair. Fabian holds a dead man’s float, tracing the fractal shapes of the ceiling support beams. It should be quiet between them, but every little sound echoes and ricochets in the empty pool.
“I don’t know why I even want to be friends with them,” Fabian says, out into the emptiness. “I don’t think I do.”
There’s another space of silence.
“Does everyone think I’m a dick?”
“I don’t know. I mean, we’ve sat next to each other in class for a year and this is the first time you’ve ever talked to me, you know? I don’t think you give people much opportunity to assume anything else. Also, I heard you punched a kid on the first day of school.”
Fabian closes his eyes against the burning chlorine. “You’ve never talked to me before today either.”
Riz laughs a little, and Fabian listens as the arc of it traces around the room. “Maybe I’m a dick too, you don’t know.”
“I do know,” Fabian insists, feeling the water lap around his face and ears. “And I think you’re pretty cool.”
“Right,” Riz says.
The pool is so empty, and with his eyes closed Fabian might imagine that it stretches outward into forever. When the bell rings they’ll have to hurry out to miss the gym class coming in, but for now it’s forever. Fabian’s eyes sting with the chemicals. “I don’t want people to think I’m a dick. I… it’s just. I feel like everybody’s looking at me all the time.”
There’s the sounds of water lapping as Riz moves to his left, and the soft huff of a laugh. “As someone who’s spent a year in class with you, trust me, nobody is looking at you ever.”
Fabian opens his eyes to this, alighting on Riz’s lopsided smile. He breaks the float, cool water enveloping his body as he sinks, coming parallel with Riz. The two of them tread water, circling each other like boxers waiting for the first strike. “Thank you,” Fabian says, earnestly.
“Yeah, whatever,” Riz says, and splashes Fabian.
He escapes from retaliation by diving down and rocketing away, his cackle echoing off of the tall pool walls. Fabian follows beneath the surface, eyes open, burning. Below him, the tile and lane lines morph and twist as the water moves to accommodate him. And there’s a moment where he catches up to Riz by the wall of the pool, by the ladder, and reaches out a hand to slow his escape, and finds purchase on the skin above Riz’s hipbone, where his shirt had floated up in the water.
Riz turns and Fabian pulls away, because they don’t know each other, and Riz exhales a stream of bubbles and looks at Fabian with wide, questioning eyes, the water push-pulling around them, and for a second Fabian thinks that something might happen.
In the strange, shapeless light, Riz’s green skin is awash in shades of turquoise and flickering blue shadow. His hair moves, unbidden, an absent sway around his face. The unironed collar of his shirt has turned out, shrouding his neck in fabric, the moles and freckles and acne that Fabian has memorized.
And for a moment something passes over Riz’s expression, something curious and eager, and Fabian isn’t sure whether to move back or forward, and then Riz pushes up off of the wall and breaches the water with a gasp for air.
Right.
Fabian kicks up and hauls himself onto the ledge of the dry ground, out of the water, shivering in the sudden shock of cold air.
He swings his feet in the water and doesn’t look at Riz. He stares at an orange foam dodgeball that’s wedged itself in the rafters, wonders how it got there, and wonders how one might get it out. He manages to come up with a complicated rube-goldberg solution before remembering that mage hand exists, and Daybreak could just ask any spellcaster if he really cared about getting the ball down. Clearly it’s not high on his list of priorities.
Riz climbs the ladder out of the pool and stands stock-still, bare feet making two wet puddles on the concrete, a disgusted curl to his lip. “I didn’t think this through,” he says.
“Next class should come in fifteen minutes,” Fabian says, glancing at the cage-covered clock on the wall.
Riz just shakes his wet hands, sending droplets flying, and grimaces. “God, I don’t even have gym clothes here. I really didn’t think this through.”
His dorky button-down sticks to his torso all wrinkled and translucent. Fabian surely doesn’t look much better. But he pulls his feet up out of the water and stands, brushing chalky dust off of his letter jacket and offering it to Riz, who looks like he’s freezing. “If we go back to my house, I could lend you some clothes.”
Riz eyes Fabian suspiciously and doesn’t take the jacket. “I see one glaring issue with that.”
“Well, sure,” Fabian agrees, “but if we go to my house, at least the clothes I can lend you will successfully fit onto your body. If we go to your place, I’ll end up wearing these wet clothes all day.”
“We could always split up,” Riz shrugs. “We both go home, we meet up later.”
And Fabian can’t figure out a good excuse as to why they shouldn’t do that, so he stays silent. But he’s learned the hard way that Riz is insufferably perceptive, and apparently his face is wide open enough that Riz’s expression softens and he says, “it’s cool. We’ll go to yours.”
Desperate, that’s how Riz had seen him. Fabian tries not to let that revelation color their interactions.
They walk, dripping, through the halls. It’s passing period, but only a few people seem to pick them out of the crowd; it’s Aguefort, and weird shit happens all the time. Seeing two boys a little wet is hardly anything to stop the presses over.
They pass the lady at the front desk and she doesn’t question their leaving, she never does, but Riz buzzes with nervousness nonetheless. He’s never skipped school, he reminds himself. Every day is the first time.
On a normal day, Fabian would absolutely not let anyone sit in wet clothes on his father’s leather seats. But it’s not a normal day, nothing about any of this is normal, so he doesn’t even bother throwing a towel down. Instead they coast down suburban streets shivering in the artificial wind, and the humidity prevents them from drying.
They pull into Fabian’s driveway and dawdle, for a moment, out in the sun on his lawn. It’ll be cool and dark inside, but out here it’s bright and hot, without a breeze to chill them.
Fabian leads Riz through his home, ignoring the way Riz’s eyes bug at the bizarre and ostentatious decor, gawking at the lit chandeliers swinging from the rafters. They always swing, somehow, to mimic the feeling of the ocean. Sometimes it makes Fabian a little nauseous, but he’d never say so.
In his own bedroom, Fabian changes and then sets off on the mission to find something for Riz, digging through the very depths of his wardrobe. He finds a t-shirt from middle school and a pair of shorts with belt loops, which Riz cinches around his waist to a degree that’s almost comical.
When he emerges from the bathroom in his new ensemble, Fabian really does his best not to laugh. The shorts, which do stay up thanks to the belt, hang just past his knees, all khaki and hideous. The shirt fits him better, but the collar sits loose around his neck. It looks awful, it really does. But it’s also Riz, and he looks so disgruntled that it makes something behind Fabian’s sternum flip and twist. “Shut up,” he says.
“I didn’t say a thing,” Fabian protests. “I think this is the new fashion.”
Riz rolls his eyes and shoves his hands in his pockets, eyeing Fabian’s bedroom warily. But he catches on something by Fabian’s bookshelf and his face lights up. Fabian tries hard not to commit that expression to memory.
“Oh man, you’ve got a record player? Do you have any of the Smiths?” Riz crosses the room in a single bound and kneels by Fabian’s records, the milk crate that his father had gotten him to steal off of the back kitchen door of his middle school, and starts flipping through.
“No, I, uh- well, I did have them. Once. I went and bought an album because you said you liked them, but it didn’t stay.”
“Because of the time loop,” Riz figures. “Right. No, you’ve just got, let’s see, the Beatles and… 50 Best Sylvan Reels and Hornpipes.”
“Come on, I have other things.”
“So sorry,” Riz says, and pulls out a worn vinyl from the back. “You’ve got Mahler’s second symphony? My favorite!”
And Fabian should recognize the sarcasm, but his mouth works faster than his brain and he blurts, “really? You’ve heard it?”
Riz grins up at him, open and disbelieving. “Man… no.” He puts the record back and continues his exploration through Fabian’s music taste. He shakes his head a little, fondly. “You really are weird.”
If it were anyone else, Fabian would be hurt to be labeled such, the greatest offense of high school. Weirdness, freakdom. He’s fought tooth and nail to be considered normal, if not perfectly situated above average, but as Riz thumbs through his record collection he calls Fabian weird as though it’s the greatest compliment one can be paid.
“We used to have a record player when I was a kid, but once we knocked into it moving boxes or something and it broke. It’s been the radio for us since.”
“Why didn’t you get a new one?” Fabian sits on the edge of his bed, feeling like a stranger in his own room, and watches Riz’s shoulders move as he flips through titles.
Riz shrugs. “They’re expensive. I don’t know.”
“Oh.”
They listen to the Beatles, eventually, because it’s the only thing that Riz has even remotely heard of, and Riz sits at the foot of Fabian’s bed and watches the leaves of the big tree wave outside the window.
Times like this, Fabian likes to pretend. It’s an ordinary Friday, and they’ve come home from school to spend a normal afternoon with each other as friends. They’re friends.
He’s had some of the Owlbears over, for parties and the like, but he doesn’t think he’s ever had anyone in his room. Not in a long time. It’s strangely intimate.
They’re in his bedroom, listening to a record, and Riz is perched on Fabian’s bed like he’s worried he’ll fall off if he moves, and Fabian just wishes that this was normal for them. That they could just be true friends. He would be content with that, nothing more.
The A side spins to a stop, and Riz watches with rapt attention as the automatic tonearm lifts neatly out of the way, like magic. It’s not magic, of course. But.
Fabian flips the record and doesn’t sit back down on his bed, because actually making the conscious movement to sit down next to Riz on his own bed seems too strange, too foreign, so he sits on the floor and leans against his wardrobe doors.
Time passes strangely. Well, it always does, nowadays. But the world seems to swim around him, chords unattached to any sort of melody, just passing snapshots of the green leaves and the soft imprints of Riz’s socked feet on Fabian’s duvet. He wishes he didn’t feel like he was breaking some sort of rule. Like they’re not supposed to be doing this, like he shouldn’t feel comfortable doing this.
After 45 minutes or three, the record finally whirs to a hissing end, and the room is plunged into silence.
Fabian’s back hurts. “We never had lunch,” he realizes, catching a glimpse of the discouraging time on his bedside clock.
Riz shrugs. “I mean, I don’t mind.”
“No, come on. We have to go eat something.”
“I don’t just want to leave my wet clothes here,” Riz says, jerking a thumb towards Fabian’s ensuite bathroom. But then he catches himself, remembers what day it is, and says, “I guess.”
And by the time they exit through Fabian’s front door, the day is already cooler than when they came.
-
Time passes, strangely, but passes nonetheless. They’re the only two people at the pizza place in the middle of the day, and Fabian feels like the man behind the counter watches them as Riz puts away slice after slice. He thinks of the nose-ringed cashier at the ice cream shop, the one who had seen them and smirked. He hides his face, then thinks better of it.
He likes Riz. Likes whatever approximation of a friendship they have. He shouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with him.
Time passes, and senior prom looms like a cloud casting a shadow over a sunny day.
By the time they arrive, swinging into the parking spot beside Lawrence’s douchebag SUV, prom has already kicked off with its continual eagerness. In the dying light of the evening, the last rays of golden hour, Aguefort rises grandiose and shining from above the bloodrush field and swaths of asphalt.
The windows of classrooms gleam and wink in the sun, twinkling with a humor that Fabian doesn’t feel. Music floats past on the breeze.
Fabian taps his knuckles on the hood. “Alright,” he says, for no reason. “Here we are.”
And Riz sets off for the high school, briefcase swinging lightly in his hand as he walks, not looking back to see if Fabian is following. For a moment, he thinks against it. But he needs to stop this for real, and he can’t do that if he runs and hides, tail between his legs, like a coward.
They make it as far as the steps before Fabian falters.
“I can’t do this,” he says.
Riz turns, fingers on the push-pull door handle. “What?”
Something awful tries to crawl its way up Fabian’s throat, digging in its fingernails all the way up his esophagus. He swallows it down. “I can’t go in again. I can’t- I can’t do all of this again.”
“Right.” Riz frowns, tilts his head a little. “But- well… it’s just prom?”
Fabian thinks that’s terribly ironic for Riz to say to him, Riz who’s marching in there to face a dragon. He shakes his head. “I can’t. I-”
Riz stands with his hand on the door, a knot between his eyebrows. The music pounds and sways. “Please,” Fabian says.
It’s clear that Riz wants to go in. Why wouldn’t he, it’s him versus the end of the world. Desperate, says the conflicted twist to his mouth.
And he must look pretty damn desperate, because Riz’s shoulders fall and he looks behind him at the parking lot, once, before painting on a pitying little smile and saying, “okay. We won’t go in yet.”
Yet.
It’s hot outside, Fabian remembers that much from last night. He sits- practically collapses- on the step, looking out over the sea of cars. Riz sits beside him.
Last night, he came out to some redheaded girl- Kristen, was that her name- as Riz fought off his dragon. Just like then, he takes off his jacket to save himself the sweat. Riz, who’s already in a t-shirt and shorts, forks a hand through his half-dry hair, still a little lingeringly damp from the ambient summer humidity.
Riz’s briefcase rests between his knees, a gun tucked between his textbooks and homework never to be handed in.
There are lots of things that Fabian could, and should, say. But before he can muster the courage, he’s saved by Riz inclining his head towards the gym and asking, rather bluntly, “why don’t you want to go in?”
The world is stained sepia-toned around them, and Fabian tries to see the beauty in the lush green leaves on the trees, the first buds of hydrangeas. It’s a struggle. “I just… can’t.”
“I would’ve thought you would be all into the prom thing,” Riz remarks. “Bet you could be prom king next year.”
Fabian huffs. “As if. Nobody likes me.”
“I guess.”
“Do you- you agree,” Fabian says, weakly.
Riz rolls his eyes. “Man, why would I know? I’ve never even talked to you before today. I mean, you seem popular, I don’t know.”
Fabian swallows down what feels like a shard of glass. He wonders if Aelwyn’s still at home, considering that he never came to pick her up. If she drove to his house to find him gone. He thinks that maybe he’s been a bad boyfriend.
“Being on the Owlbears isn’t the secret key to popularity that everyone thinks it is,” he says. It feels like an admission of guilt. “And I started school and my papa had lots of ideas about how to act, and what to do, so I could be-” he waves his hand vaguely in the nebulous space of social standing- “on top. And then, you know, you get to the end of freshman year and you realize that you don’t have any friends, and all of his advice was sort of just to… be an asshole to everyone. And my papa, he’s the most incredible man to walk the earth, but he- he didn’t have to go to high school.”
A firetruck goes careening by, siren howling into the air. They watch it pass, and Fabian feels a little stab of sadness for whoever’s night has just been ruined, has been every single night for this whole thing, just waiting for Fabian to step outside at the right time in the right place to see it.
Riz props his chin in his hands and watches Fabian through his periphery. It would be unnerving if Fabian didn’t know Riz so well, if he didn’t intimately know that this was just the look of him doing the daily decoding of Fabian’s personality, every day anew.
“Why does it matter so much if people like you?” He asks, candidly and thoughtfully.
Fabian tries to get words out, meaningful words, but they’re held up at the border of his lips as all that comes out is gibberish. “It doesn’t- I mean- I… well, it’s not nice. Having no friends.”
“I don’t really have any friends either,” Riz says. “S’just school.”
“You don’t mind?”
Riz shrugs. In the hunch of his back, Fabian can see the bumps of vertebrae peeking over the slouching collar of his secondhand shirt. “I mind. It just doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things.”
Fabian thinks of the dragon, of the gun that sits between them. “I suppose.”
A light quiet falls between them. It’s almost casual, almost familiar.
Riz’s hair curls around his ears. It’s puffy and patternless, like he doesn’t condition it right. And Fabian does nothing more than look as Riz watches cars go by on the street below, does nothing more than look at his hair in the sun and the plane of his nose and the purple half-moons beneath his eyes. Here, in the parking lot, Fabian thinks that Riz is beautiful and cool and funny and interesting. And so is Aelwyn, but she’s cool for somebody else, she’s meant for someone else to slowly discover her dry wit and mocking sense of humor. Not Fabian.
He wonders if she’s at home, if her misery has found company in her sister, or if they don’t cross paths after Fabian greets her at the door.
He should be in love with her. He’s not.
And if it were up to Riz, he would say that it doesn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things.
It’s hot, but as thin clouds float across the languidly setting sun, it doesn’t feel as suffocating. A cool, earthy breeze passes through.
“At least if you had to choose a day,” Riz muses, “this is a pretty good one.”
“It’s not,” Fabian says.
Riz clicks the latch of his briefcase open and closed, open and closed. “Nice weather, I mean.”
They sit in silence. Beyond the parking lot, cars pass by on the street below, windows flashing in the sunlight.
“So,” Riz says, hand darting up to scratch his neck, the wispy hairline below his ear. “You talk to me every day?”
“I try to.”
“Hm.” Riz tilts his head down towards his shoes. “Why?”
Fabian sighs, expels all the air from his lungs, and leans back on his wrists, the concrete beneath him digging into the palms of his hands. He hazards a glance at Riz, the silhouette of his face and shoulders. “You want to know a secret? You know, in the spirit of the time loop.”
“Won’t remember it, anyway,” Riz says with a slight smile. “Hit me.”
“I really, really like you.”
A horrible silence descends over them. Riz’s fingers freeze on the latch.
“Oh. Like-”
“Yes.” Behind them, the band starts a new song, invoking cheers from the assembled partygoers. Fabian shouldn’t be able tell what song it is, everything but the bass washed out through the walls, but he knows exactly which song is playing, just like he knows everything else that happens this night. “Like that. I like you- in that way.”
Riz turns his head, slowly, picking Fabian apart beneath his gaze.
Fabian should be terrified. It is, objectively, terrifying to say that sort of thing. But he’s not; there’s a calm resignation that makes itself home in his chest. What can Riz do to him? Nothing. And even if he could, he wouldn’t. Fabian knows him well enough to know that.
And it’s true.
“I don’t,” Riz says, at long last. “I mean, obviously.”
“I know,” Fabian says.
“It’s, I mean, it’s nothing against you. It’s just… I don’t know you.”
Fabian closes his eyes, tilts his face up to the last rays of summer sun. “Mhm.”
A long beat. “Have you ever told me before?” Riz asks, from somewhere to his right.
“No.”
“Oh,” Riz says. “When did you start? Before the…”
“No, no,” Fabian says. “Sometime in all this. I know you don’t know this, but we really have spent a lot of time together. I- you have to promise not to laugh- uh, well. I think you’re sort of my best friend.”
Riz does not laugh. Instead, when Fabian cracks an eye to look at his reaction, he looks deeply sad. “Sorry,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I had a good time today. Even with your ugly clothes. And your bad music.”
“Everyone likes the Beatles,” Fabian scoffs.
“Sure,” Riz says, soft, and kicks his legs out in front of him, all green knobbly knees.
He wonders what Riz thinks of him now. Fabian, who had looked desperate. Pathetic Fabian, whose best friend is a stranger. A stranger that he really, really likes.
In an ideal world, Riz would look over at him with a wonderful bright expression, the kind that speaks volumes about understanding and forgiveness and hope. But it’s not, and Riz’s shoulders sit high and tight as he absently taps his toes together.
In the distance, a deep rumble underscores the pounding soundtrack of prom. Riz freezes. “Was that thunder?” He asks, the low voice of someone who knows it wasn’t.
“Probably a truck,” Fabian says. “There’s no thunder tonight.”
“Right.” Regardless, Riz’s posture is stiff and anxious. To him, the clatter of a passing truck, or a dumpster being rolled across uneven concrete, probably sounds like the disastrous noises of a dragon attack. But it’s not time for that yet, and it’s supposed to rain on the Saturday that never comes, not tonight. Riz nervously looks behind him, makes eye contact with Fabian, and sighs. His shoulders collapse. “I’ve never had to turn someone down before.”
“You’re not really turning me down, considering I didn’t ask you out. I was more just… sharing.” The concrete bites Fabian’s palms. He pushes himself up, sitting forward, elbows on his knees. “But really, you’ve never been asked out before?”
Riz shoots Fabian an incredulous look out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah, turns out that when you’re treasurer of the AV club and a goblin who doesn’t own a shirt without buttons, you don’t really top the list of ‘hottest guys in school.’”
“That’s ridiculous,” Fabian says haughtily. “I think you are.”
Riz rolls his eyes and smiles his crooked smile. “Thanks,” he says, ever so tinged with sarcasm.
In the fading light, Riz stands and stretches, arms high above his head, and his back cracks with the effort. Fabian casts his eyes downward.
He stands with his hands on his hips and squints up at the gym; the only evidence Fabian can see of prom happening is the way the multicolored lights dance and shift as they hit Riz’s figure, the oscillation of hundreds of bodies casting shadows through the windows.
Riz stands at attention, scanning the building, and clicks his tongue against his teeth once, sharply, just as he had in Aguefort’s office as he analyzed Fabian. The one thing he couldn’t have guessed: you’re nervous. You’re not looking for a fight, but you’re nervous.
One guess as to why.
“I do have something to tell you,” Riz says, as he stares down the gym. Fabian’s heart skips a beat. “It’s going to sound insane, but I- I’m pretty sure that vice principal Goldenhoard is actually the dragon Kalvaxus, and he’s unable to become, you know, a dragon, until a king and a queen are crowned in Elmville, and I think he’s going to do it here, when they vote in the prom queen.”
There’s a brief stun of silence. Fabian lets his head fall back against the brick of the school wall. “So that’s where the dragon comes from.”
“You’ve seen the dragon?” He looks around frantically, pats his pockets as though worried he left his keys at home. “We’ve got to go stop it, we’ve got to- where’s your weapon?”
“Left it at home.” Fabian closes his eyes, the summer air warm and humid against his skin. A wind blows in from the east, the trees whispering as they move.
Fabian can’t see Riz, but he can easily picture his incredulous face. “You knew there was going to be a dragon at prom,” he says slowly, as if explaining something to a particularly stupid toddler, “and you didn’t bring your weapon?”
“Well, sure,” Fabian says. “Because every night there’s a dragon, and then it kills you, and then I wake up.”
Another firetruck passes. It must be a large fire.
After a long moment, Fabian opens his eyes and looks at Riz properly. He’s standing there, hands limp at his sides, a dejected and lost slump to his shoulders. Behind him, a streak of pink smears across the sky between low, gray clouds.
He looks at Fabian, then away. He wets his lips and sighs. “How many times?”
It’s a funny question. It’s a remarkably Riz question.
“Lost count.”
“You-” Riz begins, almost frustrated again, but stops himself. He thumbs at the hem of his shirt, Fabian’s shirt, hair hanging low over his eyes. “Oh.”
Fabian hums. He watches that pink sunset, the way the light illuminates the flyaway hairs around Riz’s neck and ears.
“I was so annoyed,” he muses, “that there was still another week left of school. I just wanted to be done, like the seniors. And I think that without all of this it would be, ah, August? Maybe even early September.”
“I die,” Riz says.
“Every day.”
“Vice principal Goldenhoard kills me.”
“Usually.” Fabian tucks his hands between his knees, feeling more shy and penitent than ever. “Once you had a heart attack.”
Riz frowns. “I’m seventeen.”
“It caught both of us by surprise,” Fabian admits. He wonders if, had they been two different people, or if this whole thing hadn’t gone on for as long as it had, if there might be some humor in the situation. He searches his heart and finds that there’s not.
Slowly, belaboredly, Riz sits back down next to Fabian. Before, they were close enough that their elbows might have touched. Now there’s a painful ten inches between them.
“Did you,” Riz begins. He stops, and works at a bit of broken skin on his bottom lip. When the flesh tears, he tries again. “Did you try to talk to me before I died, or did you talk to me because I was the one dying?”
Guilty, guilty. “It was… I did just want to figure out what was happening, at first.”
“Did you?”
“No.” I’m sorry, he tries to say. I wish I had known you before all of this, in a world without the lingering shadow of your constant death.
Riz picks at a scab on his knee. “But you kept talking to me anyway.”
“You’re interesting.” Fabian shrugs. “And you didn’t like me.”
“According to you, nobody does,” Riz says, and Fabian’s about to be offended, but he sees the lilt at the corner of Riz’s mouth and realizes, belatedly, that he’s making a joke.
Fabian spent so many days feeling bad about dragging Riz along on selfish adventures built on half-truths, a deep and lingering guilt about the underhanded ways he tried to get Riz to do nothing more than like him. And he’s not stupid. He’s gone through months of Riz’s guarded attitude, his apprehension towards anyone even shaped like a bloodrush player, and he knows that they could never have been friends in the loop, but probably not outside of it either.
And he feels bad about it. And it sucks. And in a perfect world there’s someone he could tell these things to, a friend’s wisdom and shoulder to cry on, but there’s not.
“Do you ever just…” Fabian watches the leaves move in the breeze, lush and green and brimming with the last traces of spring pollen. “I don’t know. Sometimes I just wish everything was different.”
Riz leans his elbows on his knees and looks out over the parking lot. He blows his bangs out of his face and purses his lips in a sad, childlike way. “Yeah,” he says, and swallows thickly. “I was actually really looking forward to senior year.”
Well. That it’s all very unfair goes without saying.
“I think you should have as many friends as there are people in the world,” Fabian declares. “I think you deserve it. And I think people would be more than happy to be friends with you if they were smart enough to know it.”
Riz’s lips twitch like he’s trying not to smile. “Sounds stressful,” he says instead. “Having that many friends.”
“You deserve it,” Fabian repeats.
The sky rumbles, low and slow.
“That was thunder,” Riz decides.
“There’s no thunder tonight,” Fabian says.
The gym pounds with music behind them. Before them, on the street, the world goes on. It’s almost dizzying, the way everything whirls past while Fabian sits still in the parking lot of his high school.
Riz sits beside him. The chlorine from the pool has made his hair frizzy and loose, hanging over his face in a way that makes him look his age; he’s no dragon-killer, gun in his briefcase. He’s a junior in high school, and he’s going to die. Fated to.
Tears prick at the corners of Fabian’s eyes. Behind him, the gym hums with major guitar chords.
“When does Kalvaxus come?” Riz asks, quietly.
“Don’t,” Fabian says. “I don’t want to think about the fucking dragon.”
Riz clicks the latch of his briefcase open, then closed again. “He’s going to kill people.”
It’s not an assertion that Fabian has an argument for. It’s true. The people he’s going to kill is Riz, and that’s the wrench in the whole thing. That’s why he can’t let Riz go in there. “What would you do?” He asks instead. “If everything could be different.”
“I’d probably kill a dragon,” Riz says, with his trademark sardonic bite. Fabian really, really likes him. And he looks up, and meets Fabian’s eyes, and almost smiles. “I guess if everything could be different, I wouldn’t have to do it alone.”
A cool, wet wind blows by. Cars rush past on the road below. “What about you?” Riz asks.
“God,” Fabian says, and falls back on his hands again. “I’d do whatever I wanted. Maybe I’d quit the Owlbears. Take up knitting, or something. I’d just… I would say hello to people, and I wouldn’t worry so much about what my papa would think of me, and I would just be weird and freakish and I would like that.”
“Sounds nice,” Riz says. “Here’s to us freaks.”
“And,” he continues, slowly. He grinds a green leaf to a pulp against the asphalt beneath his heel, watching the juice spill out onto the pavement. “If you would let me, if everything was different, I think I’d like to be friends with you.”
Riz stares absently at the green smear beneath Fabian’s foot. His hair falls in his eyes.
“I wish I knew you,” he says.
Against all odds, Fabian feels himself smile. “Me too.”
The sun is gone now, the lethargic summer sunset over. Instead, low clouds choke out the stars.
A drop falls on Fabian’s forehead.
He wipes it off. Another drop lands on his knuckle.
Riz looks up, squints at the sky. “Is it raining?”
“It doesn’t rain tonight,” Fabian says, holding up his hand to the light, seeing the water reflect and gleam against his skin.
The band inside the gym plays something sultry and slow. A dragon will be loosed on the Aguefort prom before the hour hand changes.
Riz walks out a few steps, hands turned upwards, as if waiting for a divine blessing. It comes in the form of raindrops, speckling the asphalt in pointillism.
“It doesn’t rain tonight,” Fabian says, again.
But it does. And it is.
And it’s all happened so fast; one minute it was humid and clear, and now Riz is looking up at the illuminated downpour in cones beneath the street lamps, mouth slightly parted in equal parts irritation and wonder.
Fabian’s shoulders are wet, because it’s raining. Fabian’s hair is wet, because it’s raining.
It’s Friday, June third, and it’s raining.
A noise escapes his mouth, something between a laugh and a howl. “Riz, it’s raining!”
“Yeah,” Riz says, with a tilt to his smile and a confused tightness to his brow. “So were you lying to me, or what?”
Fabian stumbles out into the open parking lot, the roadway for bus pickup, the steadily forming puddles around the sewer drains. “Not today,” he murmurs. “No lies today.”
Riz coughs out a laugh. “This is weird, man.”
Probably. But it doesn’t matter, because it- well, it’s never happened before.
The heat is breaking. Cold, pelting rain falls down around them, the skies opening up under the low blanket of dark clouds. The parking lot reflects in yellow while prom rages on inside.
Fabian left the top down on the car. In this moment, that matters to him less than anything else in the world.
Rivulets of water run down Fabian’s face; he wipes his eyes to remove the blur. Riz holds his briefcase under his arms as if scared of getting the leather wet. Normally, Fabian would tell him not to worry, that nothing will ever happen to the leather, that it will always return to its original, pristine state come morning.
But he’s not sure if that’s true anymore.
He’s not sure what he did, if anything at all. But it must have been something, and it must have clicked there on the concrete stoop, in the shadow of the high school, when he stumbled blindly off of the cliff of earnest friendship.
“I don’t know what this means,” Fabian says, although his voice sounds distant and breakable in the roar of the storm, “but if I wake up and tomorrow’s Saturday, I’m going to… I’m gonna do whatever I want, and I’m going to go to your house and we’re getting pancakes.”
“Alright,” Riz says, with a little amused laugh. “Well, here’s hoping it’s Saturday.”
And then a sound like an earthquake explodes from the gym, and the big windows erupt with flame. There’s a dragon in the middle of it all, as always, and Fabian watches as Riz hesitates, puts a hand on his briefcase, and turns back to Fabian for one brief moment.
If tomorrow’s Saturday, everything will be different. He can make that vow. Riz stands silhouetted by the multicolored lights of prom, and Fabian meets his gaze, and promises that everything will be different.
There’s uncertainty there in Riz’s expression, and maybe hope, hope that he won’t have to do it alone. But that’s gone in an instant, and in the yellowed glow of the artificial light his face hardens into a mask of steely determination.
He pauses, one more time, with his hand on the door. He doesn’t look back this time.
And Fabian watches, from the rain, as Riz with frizzy hair and waterlogged shoes cocks his gun and strides into the blaze of the Aguefort gym, and
..
Fabian’s first thought upon waking is that the sun is wrong for six in the morning. Golden light spills in through the open window, throwing bright honeyed shapes across his bedroom ceiling. There’s no kalimba music, no alarm, to break the silence, and the window by his bed is cracked open to let in an early summer breeze. And there, rummaging through his wardrobe, is Aelwyn Abernant in her rugby uniform, the skin of her arms pink and spotty as if her body is still cooling down from heavy exercise.
“I forgot you played rugby,” he says. His mouth is dangerously dry.
Aelwyn’s head whips around. Her hair is short, just barely hanging over the tips of her ears, and her lips shape into a perfect O. “Holy shit,” she says. Then she smiles, disbelieving, and rushes forward to gather him up in her arms.
“Hey, Wynnie,” he says.
“You dumb fucking idiot,” she laughs, and he’s been half-hauled up into a sitting position by the ferocity of her embrace. She smells like sweat. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you-” she pulls away, holds him at arm’s length, and touches one hand to the side of his face before saying, “I’m getting Riz.”
Fabian pulls the sheets away- he’s wearing pajamas he doesn’t recognize- and throws his legs over the side of the bed. His body is stiff and eager to move. “What were you doing in my room?” He asks through a smile of his own.
“We take shifts,” she says, as if that explains anything, and touches his arm, still tentative, as if he might disappear beneath her grasp. “I’m getting Riz,” she echoes, and goes tripping out of the room. At the door, she stops and flashes him a broad grin. “Later, okay?”
And she’s gone.
Fabian stands, cracks his back, and looks around his bedroom. He can no longer see on his right side, which is a curious comfort. He reaches up and touches the well-healed scar tissue there, reminds himself of reality. White curtains billow gently over the window: a postcard sits jammed between the wood frame and the glass and a foreign coin sits dustily beside a beeswax candle on the sill. This room, his room, is far less spartan than the one he had been waking up in for months. He’s got dance shoes lined up by the closet, and a water bottle with a colorful collage of stickers, pictures and mementos strewn all over.
It’s junior year and Fabian doesn’t know what day it is, or how long he’s been out of school, or if it even is junior year any more. If he pushes aside all of the false information from those months of repetition, and the false memories that lived in the world that preceded it, he last remembers the big tree out the window having just started budding. Now it’s vibrant and green, the delicate white spring petals having come and gone.
He lived a whole life in that other world. And yet it’s all dissipating, like a dream, the more he feels the hardwood beneath his feet and the warm, perfumed breeze on his skin.
Above his desk is a makeshift gallery of his friends, their brightest moments: Ragh in a rainbow crop-top, Adaine and Aelwyn smiling shyly next to one another in a booth at Basrar’s, a Cig Figs poster. Two and some true years of high school. It’s summer, clearly. He might have entirely missed the back end of junior year.
Light footsteps hammer down the hallway. Fabian’s door is thrown open, rattling against the hinges. In the doorway, in pajama shorts and one of Adaine’s sweaters, stands Riz, adjusting his glasses in the light.
“Oh my god,” he says. His hair is messy and longer than Fabian remembered, and his eyes have sunken deep into his sallow face, ringed with bruiselike purple and black. And he adjusts his glasses again, and takes in a nervous breath, and says, “Fabian.”
And it’s just like his missing eye: the world hadn’t seemed wrong around him, but it does now that he sees it in its rightful form. The Riz in that other world, the Riz that had never known him, had felt real at the time. But this is the real Riz. Despite his casual clothing, his wrists are stacked with his watch and various bracelets that he never takes off, leather cords and multicolored braided string and everything else, the belongings of a boy weighed down with a surplus of friendship. He looks at Fabian with a deep familiarity and bold-faced, dueling expressions of hurt and relief.
“I tried-” he begins, and seems to choke on his words. “I tried to figure it out.”
Fabian doesn’t say anything, just steps forward, and Riz falls into his arms.
“I fucking missed you,” Fabian mumbles, relishing the feeling of a friend, that thing he had been so sorely lacking. “You’re my best friend, you know that?”
Riz laughs- weakly- against Fabian’s collarbone. “Shit, man, what did they do to you?”
“I mean it,” Fabian says.
Riz pulls away, and just like Aelwyn prods at his arms and face like he’s not completely sure he’s real. “Yeah,” he says softly, “I know. I- we all thought-”
Fabian bats Riz’s hand away from his cheek, the cheek that’s strained from the grin that he can’t quite smother. “A fake world can’t keep Fabian Seacaster away for long,” he quips. Riz’s eyes dance with fondness behind a thin sheen of exhaustion. “Now come on, I promised the other you that we were getting pancakes. When was the last time you ate?”
In the van, windows down, Fabian’s friends badger him relentlessly. It’s a cool day, the air light with the smell of early summer flowers, the sky endless and blue.
There’s a new housing development going up near the high school. Fabian knows this because he passed it every day, back when the houses were all still made of plywood. Now, in the bright and gleaming days of June, the windows glint in sunlight and realtors’ signs sit camped out on the identical green yards. And there, where the street sign will soon be, is the big billboard of a clean-cut human man, his willowy elven wife, and their smiling, gap-toothed toddler. Behind them is a blue house and overlaid on top of their shoulders are the scalloped words, “AFFORDABLE HOMES IN ELMVILLE.”
It’s junior year, or at least it was, and Gorgug staunchly drives 20 through the school zone, despite the fact that it’s a Saturday, even when a neighbor’s lawn sprinkler sprays water in through the windows, making everyone scream. Fig sits shotgun, having fully twisted backwards in her seat to grill Fabian on why they never met. Kristen, who with her nose piercing and mullet has fully stepped out from the shadow of that girl he met outside of prom, the girl that was never supposed to exist, punch-buggies the roof even when Gorgug tells her to stop. Adaine’s hand, outstretched, skates on the wind, so similar to Aelwyn sitting shotgun in Fabian’s father’s car. And beside her, in the back, Riz lies curled with his head against the door, fast asleep, face alight in the late morning sun.
And this is the best day of Fabian’s life thus far.