While the World Ends Around Us (Make Believe With Me)

I just wanna go where I can get some space

Mind my simple song, this ain't gonna work
Mind my wicked words and tipsy topsy smirk
I can't take this place, I can't take this place
I just wanna go where I can get some space
- Gooey // Glass Animals

Lucas doesn't know what to do with himself.

He still hasn't worked up the energy or motivation to unpack beyond what he needs, even after weeks of being in Antwerp. He's barely even worked up the motivation to get out of bed.

He's barely left the apartment, even after his two-week quarantine mostly in his room (during which he unpacked a few shirts and the white comforter that's strewn across his mattress, which lies on the floor next to a window), despite his father's demands that he get groceries. That was their first fight after Lucas moved in. Words had been thrown around the room. Lucas wishes he had thrown other things too. Anything that might just convince his father to send him back to Utrecht. Maybe some plates. Glass. But he figures that would probably just get his father's belt lashed at him.

When his father finally surrendered to letting Lucas stay home, he told him to unpack. And then told him that he isn't allowed to put anything on the walls. Not even with tape.

So Lucas has boxes and boxes filled with things he can do nothing with but look at. Photos he'd printed before moving specifically to put on his walls, that he now just thumbs through longingly, gazing at Kes and Jayden and Isa and Liv. He even has photos of Noah, whom he'd gotten closer to in the days before the move. Noah had given him a goodbye gift of a set of pencils accompanied with a wink and a hug later on that night. He'd told Lucas that he'd caught him doodling on a napkin at a get-together a few weeks before.

"You're pretty good," Noah had told him. "You could do it seriously."

"I do," Lucas had responded. "I just don't show anyone."

"Well maybe if you show more people, more people will get you new supplies."

Lucas had just made a face and allowed him a "Maybe."

The pencils are in the same box as all his sketchbooks, the ones he's started filling with drawings and doodles, and the ones that are completely blank, bought before he moved just in case he wouldn't be able to buy any after arriving. In the box, he also has watercolours and paints and an abundance of brushes, along with palette knives he's never used. The box is on the floor next to his door. He moved it from the top of a stack of boxes after needing to find his lined notebooks for school. And his clothes.

Anyway.

The photos.

He remembers when they were taken. He heard a lot of laughter that day. He had taken some before Kes had snatched his phone (freshly cleared of storage just for the occasion), and taken more than Lucas had bothered to count. Pictures of Lucas and Isa, Isa by herself, Lucas and Liv, Lucas and Janna, Lucas and Engel, Lucas and Noah, Lucas and Jayden, Lucas and Ralph, before he had begun taking photos of them not posing. Photos of them eating, laughing, talking, hugging. Them all existing.

They were beautiful.

Lucas had told Kes he could be a photographer. Kes had said he's never thought about it.

Then Lucas had taken his phone back and taken photos of Kes and the others until his storage ran out.

He printed each and every one of them.

He flips through them whenever he can, grinning and rolling his eyes at the photos of Jayden making a face and the photo of Noah flipping his middle finger to Kes with a flat face, smiling fondly at the photo of Liv and Isa hugging, Isa's cheek squished against Liv's, gazing longingly at the ones of them all together.