𝐖𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄 ━ five hargreeves

13│GAME TIME

"Aren't you going to apologize?"

"Nope!"

"Whatever. What's the most complicated word you know?" he dragged out the question dramatically.

Lola frowned thoughtfully. "Orphic. Adjective, mysterious and entrancing, beyond ordinary understanding. It's a six-letter word."

She startled slightly when the boy looked up from his book. "Of course you'd know that word," he remarked.

"Why?"

"'Cause it describes you exactly," he said nonchalantly as he turned back to his work without another thought now that the game was complete.

The girl's eyes didn't leave him, however. He thought she was mysterious and entrancing? Hidden by her mask, a small smile curved on her lips.

✧✧✧

The sun was just starting to set on the day that marked their sixth-month mark in the apocalypse. Lola was sitting cross-legged on the ground while she looked up at Five who was sitting on a cinder block. In an unfamiliar switch of their positions the renewed-purpose notebook was sitting in the girl's lap and her head was bent as she scanned the boy's numbers for their winter jump.

"Five?"

"What?"

She rolled her eyes at his tone, used to it by now. "Before you left, did your father ever say anything about time travel?"

He shrugged, "not much. Just some dumb riddle that made no sense."

She perked up and her head lifted to look at the boy. "A riddle? What was it?"

"Some metaphor for time travelling that's useless."

"Can you at least tell me so I can figure it out?"

He scoffed, "why would you be able to figure it out when I couldn't?"

"'Cause I like riddles and you don't."

"How d'you know that?"

"'Cause you told me, idiot. I can remember things too, you know. You don't have to be a genius to recall important stuff," her gaze had landed back on the paper, determined to catch an error to rub it in the boy's face.

She thought him not liking riddles was important? He scoffed slightly, not agreeing with what she classified as important. Time-travel theories were important; dumb things like that weren't.

"Fine. He said: 'a spacial jump is trivial compared to the unknowns of time travel. One is like sliding along the ice, the other is akin to descending blindly into the depths of the freezing water and reappearing as an acorn.' I can't make any sense of it so don't feel bad if you can't either" his tone was deceptively kind.

She snorted, "of course you remember it word-for-word. And don't worry, I've never met a riddle I couldn't figure out. I just need a few days."

"My concerns over you finding the answer have been assuaged," he said sarcastically, "I'm so glad you relieved me of them."

Lola looked up and shot him a grin that he couldn't see. "Happy to help!" she said with faux-cheerfulness before she turned back to the equations.

✧✧✧

"Have you ever thought about time travel?" the girl asked awhile later.

Five shot her an 'are you stupid' look. "Do I even need to answer that question?"

She flushed, and was glad he couldn't see her face because of the mask. "I didn't mean it like that. I meant more in theory than in practice since people have all sorts of different ideas about time travel."