[dedicated to paulina (blissom) who is talented and kind x 1000000 ]
PRIYA PATEL IS ABLAZE, and there is nothing Ford can do to smother her flames (not that he's trying very hard to either).
Ford has learned something about Priya in the short time he spent with her: she is a scavenger. She digs, and claws, and tears her way through everything to find information.
Priya feasts on knowledge, ingesting every bit of information she can find. That is the way she survives. That's the way she can sit — back upright, straight, and tall — and point fingers, for Priya Patel knows all.
That is also why Kira's journal means so much to her. She can recite Emerson's, Dickinson's, Shakespeare's poetry verbatim; she memorized pi nearly fifty digits out, and yet— Priya Patel cannot tell of one reason why her best friend would've committed suicide.
But Ford O'Connell can. For in a strange, and perhaps counterintuitive turn of events, Kira left her journal — a collection of her most private thoughts — for him.
So Priya isn't just upset that Kira's father gave her her very first taste of disappointment and left the bitter aftertaste of cruel nostalgia behind (though she fumes about that for a good twenty minutes), Priya is also upset that she never knew.
"I just— oh god — I can't believe this was happening, that this happened and she never told me," Priya stammers with a heavy sigh. "I should've known. I should've done something— anything."
Ford finds it admirable that Priya believes she could've fixed years of damage and despair. As though she could step in and wave her wand around — tap on Kira's broken family once, another tap on her shattered dreams, and another on the life she wished to have — and piece the girl back together.
"You couldn't have," he replies, softer.
Ford wants to eat his words as soon as they fly out of his mouth, for if there is something else he learned about Priya, it is this: under no circumstances do you disagree with her.
"You don't know that, Ford. You don't. Maybe I could've, you know? Maybe if— if she had told me or maybe if I just asked or maybe if I had been more aware, more vigilant," Priya's words die on the tip of her tongue, shoulders slightly slumping in an uncharacteristic defeat.
Ford looks at her then, the first time he ever looked at her when she was not leaping out of her seat, when she was not sitting at the very front of the classroom and he at the very back.
Up close, Priya is smaller. Ford tends to forget — when he watches her from afar with her backpack hitched high upon her shoulders and her nose thrust high in the air — that she is just a girl, in the same way he is just a boy.
He thinks of Desdemona, grape wine, mortality, and a cruel death. Then, he looks at Priya again.
Up close, Priya is not unwavering. She is not immune to bullets and disease; she's not equipped with a scepter, or a crown, or even a brass plate. She is simply a girl, sewn tightly at seams that would one day rip.
"Do you ever think," Ford begins, hoping to ease the conversation away from fire and towards something calmer, "that everything's moving too fast?"
