Everything Included

In Which The Ends Come Together

Gideon hugged me tighter, almost painfully so, as I remembered.

"Green doesn't suit you," I mused into his ear. He chuckled and released his grasp on me.

"I figured you wouldn't like it," he said, taking an Altoid's can out of his pocket and opening the lid. Inside it, rested all colors of pills, ranging from delicate purples to terrifying blacks.

"Which one?" he asked. I pointed to a black pill. Yes, its color had frightened me. But it seemed to suit Gideon the best.

His smile grew as he followed my fingertip. "You know me better than I'd like you to," he quipped, popping a greyish blue pill into his mouth.

The color reminded me of a wintery night at sea. Instantaneously, his eyes filled with that same hue.

The forest around us shifted and once again I found myself in the north corridor, my locker no longer an imposing oak monstrosity, but a poorly tended locker. Gideon was beside me, cradling me in his arms, the cold of his body causing goose bumps to freckle my neck and arms.

The grey of the morning hit against Gideon's face, his hair of pure, true black, absorbing the light that hit him. His hair had been shorter when I'd met him in the forest, a boyish curl clinging to the then chin-length curls.

He had his hair half-tied back, tiny pointed ears poked out through the blanket of night that circled his head. Maybe he had plucked the night sky from the heavens and convinced it ti stay around his head. This boy-- I was certain-- was made of the same stuff Crispen was made out of and nothing was impossible for either of them. He was delicate, dangerous, and beautiful and if he hadn't have frozen all of girls' times, they would have definitely swooned for him.

He wore a glove around his right hand only, an odd choice considering the weather held no chill, but there was reason behind his fashion, though I was certain, I'd never know the why.

I moved myself up and away from him, my energy returning, my bones on high alert and reached into my back pocket to take out the coin.

It's star scape was back, constellations of summer morphing into those of winter. The heat of an early spring was in its touch, and it trembled feveriously in my grasp, nerves woven into the metal anxiously awaiting something.

"You gave me this coin," I said, staring at it, remembering how big it had looked in my hands the first time Gideon had given it to me.

Gideon nodded, leaning hard against the  cream walls of the school. The walls looked repulsed by his presence- holding a concave appearance- as if they had all at once, wanted to turn tail and run.

What was it about this boy that made everything so scared of him?

"Why does it show me stars?" I asked, turning back to the coin, Andromeda high in its night sky.

Gideon smiled, the cigarette in his mouth, half-finished, tiny flecks of ash falling to the ground around his shoes. The coin trembled in my hand harder, matching the boy's smile the only way a coin could.

"Because you loved them so," he said, looking down at the coin.

It heated up further under the boy's gaze, reacting to it as if it had been excited by his presence. Could Gideon see the tiny night sky too?

"Of course," he began. "I made it."

Ah, right. Mind reader, check. All manner of magical being, check. Gideon could make his own night sky. Nothing inhibited him.

"You can create to," he reminded me.

"Purple," I muttered.

He laughed, allowing the cigarette to fall from his lips. He froze it mid-air and plucked it from it's impending doom.