∞XIII∞

It was Physics when Vincent slipped a sheet he tore from his notebook to my desk. Mr. Simpson always had his eye on him. It felt like he was actually waiting for Vincent to trip the wire so he could go all out on him with the punishment. But today, Vincent was intentionally being careless. I was sure the teacher saw what he did, so I snatched the piece of paper and hid it in my pocket.

The unavoidable detention was passed, not without a few demeaning comments from Mr. Simpson. Apparently, the whole school made the rumors about Vincent its business. When the class ended, the girls sitting next to me began whispering among themselves.

"I heard he bribed Coach Amyr to train him alone."

"Yeah. I bet he thinks he's better than all of his teammates. And he even pretends to be friends with them. Just shows how he's so full of himself."

"You know that accident Kyoshiro had last month? I bet Vincent had everything to do with that. He made it look like it was an accident but surely, he did that on purpose."

"Well, it worked. Kyoshiro can't play now, can he? And I thought he was going to the team captain."

"My sister's in the same grade as his younger brother and guess what he told her... He said he stumbled on Vincent while he was doing drugs."

If they intended to keep it down, they weren't keeping it down enough. I was sure Vincent could hear everything, but he just pretended not to. He just walked out of the room with an unreadable expression.

During lunch, I saw some boys actually stuffing trash in Vincent's locker as I walked by. It was vandalized pretty badly and turned into some kind of freedom wall where people wrote very harsh comments, the kind that could make your average guy cry.

It was just sad. From a varsity hero, Vincent was turned overnight into an outcast.

It had been almost half an hour of waiting. I watched students file out of the school building and the cars go one after the after. That was when I drew his note from my pocket and read it again.

After school. Parking lot.

With a sigh, I slid my hands into my jacket pockets and shifted on the balls of my feet. Vincent was supposed to meet me. He was late.

Still, I waited.

Ten minutes later, he came. He had a black eye, a bruised cheek and a bleeding lower lip. His shirt had dirt and dried blood all over it. As he approached me, I noticed he was limping.

"Wait here," he said, wincing when he strained his broken lip. "I'll get the Jeep."

I ran to him, automatically taking his arm and slinging it over my shoulder. "I'll go with you."

He didn't refuse, so I helped him toward the red Rubicon at the front of the parking lot where jocks and rich kids normally park to show off their expensive rides.

I almost stopped when I saw the state of his Rubicon. Like his locker, it too, didn't escape the wrath of bullies. It was egged and TP-ed. There were also writings on the windshield.

He tried to look unaffected but averted his gaze nonetheless.

"Ugh! Don't these people have better things to do?!" I hissed, removing Vincent's arm from my shoulder. "Wait here, okay?"

Angrily, I snatched some of the tissue paper that wasn't still soaked in broken eggs and went to the driver's side. I climbed on the Jeep's side step and wiped the windshield as far as I could reach. I also wiped the door handle before beckoning Vincent.

"See?" I told him, making an effort to smile. "It's not that hard to get off. The eggs might even make your car shinier after you rinse it off."

He didn't move. He just stared at me, more surprised than disappointed now. I went back for him and practically tow-pushed him into the driver's seat.

"You can still drive, right?" I asked him.

"Y-yeah," he answered, looking distracted.

I hurried to the front seat. Half a minute of silence passed before he finally moved to fish the keys from his pocket and start the engine.

"Wait," I said before he could step on the gas pedal.

I leaned over him to reach for his seatbelt, maintaining my distance as far as the interiors of the vehicle allowed. I could feel his eyes on me as I secured it but I pretended not to notice.

Once I had buckled myself, I looked at him and said, "We're not immortals in this world, Vincent. There's no harm in being careful."

Curbing a smile, he met my gaze, his eyes still wide with surprise and curiosity. "Now that you're saying weird things like this, I'm just going to start thinking again that you're not from this world."

I returned his smile. "What if you're right?"

"What now?" he laughed quietly. "Is this the part where you'll be confessing to me that you're an alien?"

As we drove out of the parking lot and into the road, I kept gazing at him. This Vincent was the total opposite of the Vincent I knew. In fact, everyone in here seemed to be totally different from the people I used to know. Or at least, thought I used to know. Still, as imperfect as this life was, it was still better than the one I had—or thought I had.

At least here, no one was trying to kill me for my soul. Vincent wasn't my master and if he was, he didn't seem to me like the type to order me around like a slave.

"We should get you to the hospital," I told him worriedly.

"Nah," he answered with a shrug. "This is nothing. I've had worse, really."

"Vincent," I said, managing a tinge of threat into my tone.

The corner of his lips pulled up before he flinched upon straining his sore facial muscles. "I'm gonna be okay, Aramis. I swear." He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "Dad always keeps a med kit at the back in case we get injured during camping."

"You camp a lot?"

"Used to," he answered, his eyes turning vacant.

"Vlad too?"

He nodded, his face unreadable. "He never really liked camping, but he loved following me around so..."

I knew I shouldn't pry, but my curiosity got the best of me. I never really knew much about the Vincent I left in Halo. I thought maybe I could compensate for that loss by knowing a little more about this Vincent. "What happened?"

With a shrug, he glanced at me, his eyes betraying wistfulness. "We used to go camping—Luci and Dad and me—every so often. Dad was so good at it. We would sing campfire songs while he played the guitar and we would stay up all night listening to his stories about angels and demons and spirits. Thinking about it now, I don't think I ever believed any of it..."

"How come?"

He gave me another shrug. "Because none of it was real. When I was a kid, I wanted so much to believe. I mean, it's Dad. I used to think of him as some kind of hero. Now, I just think he's a liar."

I gazed at him for a whole minute, noting the bitterness in his voice, the sadness he was trying so hard to hide. "What if he's not a liar? What if he's right and ghosts, angels, demons are real?"

"I don't mean that," he replied, letting out a tired sigh. "I mean... he's a liar because he keeps lying to himself."

I felt my forehead creasing. "I don't get it."

Shaking his head, he maneuvered the Rubicon into route 61. He stopped speaking altogether with that brooding look on his face.

Before arriving at the roadblock heading to Centralia, veered off the road and took a dirt road heading to the woods. Having draughted through these parts a few times before we went to Halo for Pilgrim's ball, I already had an idea where we were going.

The sun was about to set when we crossed the border without any difficulty. In silence, he kept driving, niftily avoiding the big cracks in the road like he had done it many times before.

Finally, we stopped in front of the abandoned church.

"Why are we here?" I asked, looking at him.

He took a deep breath before answering me. "I want to show you something."

Before I could object, he had already got out of the vehicle and limped to the compartment. He was already carrying a first-aid kit when I followed him outside.

Without a word, he took my wrist and towed me across the yard. By some miracle, Vincent found the door beneath the vines that had overrun the walls of the structure.

The door gave out an eerie creak when he pushed it open. Somehow, the inside of the church reached my expectations. It was as fit to be a setting for some horror show as the outside. The only source of light were the tiny gaps between the boarded windows. Moss infested what was made of stone. What was made of wood now smelled of decay.

Vincent turned on his flashlight, parting cobwebs that blocked our way as he did.

"And here I thought you had enough of this creepy stuff in your other life," I groaned under my breath, my eyes roaming the walls.

He threw me a confused look. "And here I thought you've decided to stop being weird."

I rolled my eyes. "He brings me to a ghost town, drags me into a haunted church then calls me weird. That makes sense."

His soft chuckles bounced off the walls. "If you're scared, you can always hold onto me. I won't mind."

"I think my definition of scary is on a whole other level as compared to yours, Vincent."

For some reason, his fingers were clammy around my wrist, his steps unsure. He led me to a set of stairs heading to the belfry. The wooden steps creaked as we climbed. Powdery dirt kept on falling from the gaps in the ceiling.

I wasn't going to be scared when I had an epiphany: if Vincent was normal and we were all in a normal world, was I normal too? I was so absorbed in my thoughts, I didn't realize that Vincent was talking to me.

"Aramis, are you okay?"

Instead of answering, I climbed past him and led the way instead.

I was out of breath by the time we reached the belfry. The sun was setting turning the horizon into a war between orange and indigo. I stood near one of the four arched windows.

Quickly, I gathered my hair and pushed it over my shoulder. I tilted my head to the side so Vincent could get a good look on my neck.

He gave me this weird look. "What're are you doing? I'm not a vampire, if that's what you're thinking."

"Ugh! What are you, three? Vampires aren't real, Vincent. Now look here."—I pointed a finger on the left side of my neck, just below my ear. "Do I have a tattoo?"

With his brows knitted, he bent over to check. "No. I don't see anything."

My hand moved mechanically to my chest to reach for the Helcium pendant. But it wasn't there. It was like the world I used to know, the world only I knew didn't even exist.

I sagged onto the floor, staring blankly at the sky. Shaking the daze off my head, I patted the spot beside me. "Let's see those bruises."

He put his flashlight on lamp mode and set in near the med kit. As I treated him, I could feel his eyes on me. He wasn't trying to hide it and I didn't mind; very much unlike when Vincent the Reaper made me self-conscious with his stares.

"I know, these past few days have been hard for you," I told him, still busying myself with his injuries. "But you're not immortal in this world. When you get hurt, you don't heal instantly."

"In this world?" he echoed. "Is there any other world out there?"

I didn't answer and began plastering a Band-Aid on the tiny laceration at the tip of his brow.

He caught my hand, forcing me to meet his green eyes as he did. They were wide, warm, filled with curiosity. "You know, if you keep talking like that I won't be able to erase the impression that you're not from this world."

I gawped at him for several seconds. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Meaning, are you really from here?" he theorized, smiling with his brows in a knot. "Or from this planet? Where are you from really? I don't know why I never even knew you existed when you were sitting right there beside me every day. You just appeared out of nowhere and ran into me. And now..."

"Now what?"

"Now, I can't stop thinking about you."

It felt like being doused with a bucket of ice water. Focusing my eyes on the window, I said, "We have to leave. It's getting dark."

As I was about to get up, he pulled me closer to him. "Just wait a few minutes more. I have to show you something."

Exhaling, I nodded.

As soon as darkness had submerged the whole borough, I saw pictures all over the walls painted with glow-in-the-dark ink. Most were just doodles, but then I saw a lot that were familiar to me. There was a castle in the middle of a round lake. The Roman numeral for thirteen. A necklace with a teardrop-shaped pendant. And then, there was me.

"That's—"

"You," he interjected, nodding. "Drew that when I was a kid. Drew every last one of it. Vlad and I used to play here a lot way back. This was our happy place. We never told Mom, of course. We knew she would freak."

I got to my feet and went to my portrait on the wall. The similarity was undeniable. It was me.

He stood close behind me, I could almost hear his breathing. "You don't look surprised. I thought you'd freak out and think I'm some kind of a psycho."

I faced him, dropping my gaze. "I already think that, Vincent. With everything that has happened to me before, I don't think a drawing on a wall is something I could get scared of."

"Then I want to know."

"Know what?" I said, frowning at him.

"What scares you," he answered, meeting my eyes. With his thumb, he straightened the crease between my brows. "What makes you smile? The things you hate. The things you like. What's most important to you?"

"W-what's most important..." I repeated, my thoughts racing.

The answer came painfully came to me, a lump in my throat I couldn't clear out. A thorn in my chest that kept digging deeper and deeper the more I tried to ignore it.

Memories of Vincent—the one with silver gray eyes—flashed in my head. I remembered the way he looked at me for the last time with his cheek pressed on the ground, with Cairo's men kicking and restraining him. For a moment there, I didn't see any trace of the anger and pain he seemed to carry every single day. In those silvery eyes, I saw hope.

I looked at the boy in front of me, into his green eyes, searching for any trace of the boy I left in Halo. This boy in front of me who had led a normal life, who, in all his innocence of the dark side of this sick twisted world had somehow still managed to find me.

As I sort out the chaos inside my head, I found him leaning closer and closer until his lips touched mine.

My eyes widened and I held the gasp that formed in my throat. I didn't move. I tried to sift what was surprise from what wasn't. In the end, I got distracted by a tiny glowing thing that floated by the window.

Firefly.

Next thing I knew, I had already pulled away from him and was following the firefly with my eyes.

"What's wrong?" he asked, uncertainty in his voice. "I thought you like me."

I wanted to run after the firefly, find out where it would go or if it would somehow lead me somewhere. But I let it disappear once I saw the disappointment on Vincent's face.

"Well, this is awkward," he murmured, unable to look at me.

"I like you, Vincent. I do," I told him. "You're a nice and sweet guy. You don't yell at me or boss me around... But—"

"There's the 'but'," he cut in. "There's always the big 'but'."

I sighed. "I just... really like you in this world, Vincent."

"But not in that way, right?" he took the words right out of my mouth.

A nod was all I could give him.

"Makes me wonder though," he said, trying to smile. "You always talk like there's another world out there unknown to everyone else. It makes me think. What's the point in all this? Things just happen to wear us out and drag us so low. Maybe this life's just one big joke."

I wished I had learned a thing or two about consoling people. I had always saw the world in its stark reality. I looked up at him, letting out a deep breath. "And it's not even the least bit funny."

"Yeah. For us," he agreed, gazing at the sky. "But maybe somebody up there's laughing now."