Rooftops At Sunrise

13

The two of them are woken at almost six in the morning, by someone ringing the bell to Damian's apartment seven times in rapid succession.

As Damian lets out a slew of curses under his breath, he rises to his feet, then opens his front door. "I thought we agreed to meet up in the morning!" he snaps at Lucas, who is standing in the entryway with his usual, nonchalant grin.

"It is morning!" Lucas exclaims. He shifts against his feet and readies himself to depart once more, even though he's just arrived. "Plus, there aren't many people on the road at this hour—if we want to get a good head start, and go shopping for all our provisions, we should probably leave as soon as the weather will allow it!"

Inside the living room, that also served as their bedroom last night, Aoi nods in approval. "He's not wrong," she calls, from the other end of the corridor. "I still need to buy a sleeping bag and a tent."

Damian raises his brow. "You have enough with you for that?"

"It was my birthday last month. My grandparents gave me money. Though, rest assured, I doubt I'll be buying anything too fancy."

Damian pauses to linger on her statement. "Oh, uh, happy birth—"

"Happy birthday!" Lucas chimes, as he jumps into the one-bedroom apartment and waves his arms around in a rather abstract, celebratory dance. He kneels to where Aoi's mattress is plopped down onto the floor and hugs his legs together. "What kind of cake do you want?"

Aoi decides she is not in the mood for this. With a groan, she turns around in her temporary bed, so that she does not have to face Lucas anymore. "I'm allergic to pastries," her voice is muffled by her pillow; Lucas hears the words anyway. "Stop trying to feed me cake," she mutters. "You would send me to the hospital."

Although the statement isn't completely right—it is more that her body does not tolerate much, not that it discriminates—the young woman is too tired to explain. And the statement makes Lucas cease with his antics, which is good enough, in her eyes.

A minute passes in which Damian kicks a flailing Lucas out. This banishment lasts for the count of precisely eighty-five seconds, before Lucas returns to take control over Damian's kitchen in order to make what he calls The Breakfast Of A Lifetime, with ingredients he fetched from inside the van they'll soon be using for their travels.

As the sweet waft of crepes fills Damian's modest abode, Aoi snatches a spare set of clothes from her luggage, along with her water-bottle that serves as a pouch for her medical food, an actual bottle filled with water, then her tooth brush, and her new set of pills that—even though she is not religious—has Aoi praying for their efficiency.

From Damian's bathroom, Aoi unscrews her water-bottle's lid. She grabs her medical food that she downs much faster than it is recommended. Her stomach aches.

The young woman ignores the pain. She grabs the other bottle filled with actual, clear fluids this time, and swallows her new pills.

They taste sour against her tongue. But she's had worse. She does not mind.

As Aoi puts the rest of the aluminum packet into the pills' respective cardboard boxes, she purposely forgets to read their potential side-effects. There's always death shoved in there somewhere. If she starts feeling odd, Aoi has no doubt she will know. Like she did, every other time, when something was wrong. Off.

She remembers being coiled up like a pill bug, years ago on her bathroom's floor. She'd held her sides; punctured by invisible needles, Aoi had screamed, Mother! Father! Are they there yet?

They, were an ambulance. And they did arrive, eventually—only, Aoi's symptoms had subsided by then. And it took three, five, seven more times of such calls for them to arrive fast enough. For them to do the tests. For them to tell the young woman: We're sorry, nothing is showing up.

And Aoi had cried that day. She had not cried before—not when there was still hope of finding something, anything. But that night hot tears had soaked her face, especially when the doctor seeing her had implied she might be depressed, or simply anxious. Because this, Aoi knew, was not Nothing. It couldn't be nothing, she thought. It couldn't be in her mind, she told herself, when she'd held her sides at midnight once more, for her body had yet again failed to digest a miserable piece of bread.

It couldn't be nothing—not when it was making Aoi suffer to such an extent, that it stopped her from living.

"Aoi?"

There is a knock on the door.

It's Damian.

Aoi finds his voice to be a soothing presence; it leads her to realize the contrast between today and yesterday; how different her current situation is, in comparison to her life from ten years back. In Aoi's eyes, this is both a great thing, and a fact that frightens her immensely. The Unknown—the young woman decides that, from now on, this is what she will call her current reality, as she replies to Damian with a single, and muttered, "Yes?"

"L-Lucas wanted to make sure you didn't want any of his crepes. I'm guessing you don't—still... I'm asking you, because I don't want to be rude."

Aoi reaches for the handle right in front of her. She tugs open the bathroom's door. Her eyes immediately meet with Damian's own. "What you are doing, is akin to asking a man who has been newly amputated of both his legs, to go out on a run with you." She frowns. "Do you not think that is rude?"

Damian purses his lips together. He goes red in the face. "Shit." He covers his mouth with an open palm. His eyes widen. "Fuck, I'm sorry."

The young woman collects her belongings; she passes him by, nonchalantly, with them in her arms, then gives Damian a curt, pat on the shoulder. "Don't worry about it," she tells him. "I understand it—if you don't understand."

"Yeah," he rolls his eyes, and follows her out, back into the living room. "As if that makes me feel any better..."

Breakfast is rather tame in comparison to what it could have been with Lucas being present.

Lucas joins Damian in devouring the strawberry crepes he made for the three of them.

Despite what Aoi had said earlier on, he still made enough for her, too. It is not that Lucas didn't listen to her words earlier on—to him, leaving her out felt wrong, and Lucas also feared that he may have misunderstood.

In his mind, her statement could have very well been a sarcastic joke he did not get—a potential mere prank, that Lucas now understands is quite real, as he finds himself eating Aoi's portion and observing the young woman from across Damian's tiny metallic dinner table, who is having literally Nothing for breakfast.