Two weeks passed in the blink of an eye.
Ikaris stared at the examination paper in front of him, watching the words move, twist, and rearrange themselves into symbols both archaic and modern. Some he recognized. Others belonged to a language he had never been taught, yet somehow understood better than the English he had spent his entire life pretending to comprehend.
He closed his eyes, inhaled, and forced himself to focus.
When he reopened them—
"Yup. Looks the same as always," he grumbled.
The boy beside him glanced over.
Ikaris returned the stare until the boy remembered his examination was considerably more interesting.
This had become a persistent problem. One that had grown increasingly troublesome over the past two weeks, despite the pills he swallowed religiously before each class. Or perhaps because of them.
Without the medication, he could at least sound out the words in his head. Slowly, painfully, but sufficiently enough to pretend he was a functioning member of society.
With the pills, however, he had to move his lips.
And moving his lips meant attracting attention.
As much as he hated admitting it, Ikaris cared about what other people thought.
He was a semi-cool kid, after all.
The sort of cool that inspired jealousy in insignificant nobodies like Tod and his equally insignificant followers. The sort that allowed him to walk through corridors without being openly pitied, despite the unfortunate circumstances surrounding his existence.
But if anyone caught him mouthing o...o-th...ers during a history examination, that carefully maintained reputation would collapse.
The bullying might stop, admittedly.
Unfortunately, it would only be replaced by something considerably worse.
Pity.
And possibly remedial classes.
Ikaris had no intention of adding academic incompetence to an already impressive résumé of orphanhood, psychiatric evaluations, and court-mandated therapy.
He stared at the paper.
The paper stared back.
He stared harder.
It remained unimpressed.
Eventually, the symbols settled into their usual indecipherable arrangement. A language entirely different from the one he was expected to know.
Or, more precisely, the language reality—and several licensed professionals—had repeatedly encouraged him to pretend he did not understand.
Because he did understand it.
That was the problem.
He understood the strange, curling characters with an intimacy that made English seem foreign. They appeared in his dreams, carved into impossible structures during particularly vivid hallucinations.
Sometimes he remembered speaking them himself.
But acknowledging that would mean acknowledging the dreams.
And acknowledging the dreams would make them real.
Ikaris needed reality to remain distinguishable from everything else.
It was becoming increasingly difficult.
Something brushed against his shoe.
A paper had drifted beneath his chair from behind, sliding between his feet with suspicious precision.
He lowered his head.
Answers.
Beautiful, glorious answers.
Even with his increasingly unreliable reading abilities, there was nothing preventing him from recognizing where the little circles had been shaded.
He reached down, retrieved the paper, and examined it.
Complete gibberish.
Naturally.
Still, the pattern was recognizable.
He already knew who had committed the charitable act.
Sabina Wells.
His only semi-friend at the school.
Their arrangement had developed almost accidentally nearly a year earlier. Her examination papers had an unfortunate tendency to wander in his direction whenever his academic prospects appeared particularly bleak.
In exchange, he moved his chair closer to hers.
It was a remarkably effective relationship.
His antisocial disposition discouraged unwanted company, and her proximity to him discouraged the sort of attention she seemed perpetually terrified of receiving.
She paid for peace with his grades.
He accepted the payment with all the dignity of a corrupt government official.
Neither had ever discussed the arrangement.
Over the past two weeks, however, her generosity had intensified.
Perhaps his condition was worsening.
Perhaps her anxiety was.
Or perhaps she had simply developed an unhealthy attachment to the continued survival of his academic career.
He memorized the pattern of shaded answers, then passed the paper backward with deliberate carelessness.
The teacher saw him.
Of course she did.
That was the point.
Had he attempted to conceal the exchange, suspicion would have followed. But when performed with sufficient shamelessness, even the most questionable behavior could be mistaken for innocence.
The teacher frowned.
Ikaris offered a bored expression.
She returned to her desk.
Wonderful.
He filled in the answers.
For the first time that morning, the symbols remained still.
Only briefly.
But long enough.
…
Ikaris crossed the classroom threshold at precisely the moment the bell rang.
Another one of his peculiar talents.
He possessed an absurd intuition for timing. He could pack his pencils, close his bag, tie an inconvenient shoelace, and begin walking toward the door with the absolute certainty that the bell would ring just as his foot escaped the sacred boundaries of the classroom.
It always did.
As though the bell waited for him.
Rather than the other way around.
Therapy had taught him to classify such things as coincidences.
An unusual awareness of routine.
Subconscious pattern recognition.
Anything sufficiently ordinary to prevent further discussion.
He preferred those explanations.
By the time the remaining students began spilling into the corridor, Ikaris had already rounded the corner and approached the staircase.
He hated sharing the air with immature children.
A moment passed.
He stopped.
You are also a child.
An unfortunate technicality.
He continued walking.
The first stair required conscious effort.
The second came naturally.
As did the third.
The fourth.
The fifth.
By the time he reached the next corridor, something had changed.
Not dramatically.
There was no sudden darkness, no collapsing world, no disembodied voice issuing commands from somewhere beyond his understanding.
There was simply an absence.
A peculiar distance between intention and movement.
He turned left.
He had intended to turn right.
His feet continued regardless.
That's strange.
He could stop.
He knew he could.
There was no physical restraint, no invisible hand wrapped around his limbs.
Yet the desire to resist seemed strangely unnecessary.
As though he were submerged beneath dark water, staring toward a surface that remained perfectly visible but impossibly distant.
He was not drowning.
Not exactly.
He simply lacked the energy to swim.
Somewhere behind him, someone called his name.
Or perhaps they hadn't.
The corridor stretched.
The walls seemed unfamiliar.
A door appeared ahead.
He knew where it led.
He had never been there before.
Both statements felt equally true.
You're dreaming.
No.
You're remembering.
That was worse.
His hand reached for the door.
He watched it happen.
And then—
Nothing.
…
The sky was painfully blue.
That was the first thing he noticed.
The second was the wind.
It moved across his face with an intimacy that felt almost deliberate, tugging at his clothes and carrying the distant sounds of students enjoying their lunch.
It was whispering a promise of flight… of sunlight.
The third was the absence of ground beneath his toes.
Ikaris looked down.
He stood on the outer ledge of the school's main building.
Several stories above the courtyard.
The drop narrowed his future to two possibilities: disability through unfortunate survival, or death through the abrupt termination of useless potential.
Neither seemed particularly appealing.
Neither seemed entirely unreasonable.
He blinked.
How did I get here?
There was no answer.
Only the wind.
And the unsettling realization that his body had apparently made a decision without consulting him.
A hand gripped the back of his shirt.
Hard.
Hard enough that the fabric strained against his throat.
"Ikaris?"
The voice was quiet.
Almost lost beneath the wind.
He turned his head.
Dark hair whipped across a pale face. Brown eyes stared at him with an expression so openly frightened that he found himself momentarily distracted by it.
Her lips trembled.
She appeared to be struggling with the complicated task of breathing.
Sabina Wells.
His semi-friend.
The girl who never raised her hand unless absolutely necessary. Who stumbled over her own feet with embarrassing regularity, avoided eye contact as though it were a competitive sport, and possessed the peculiar ability to disappear into a crowded room without actually leaving it.
She looked terribly out of place.
Then again, so did he.
"Sabina Wells?" he murmured.
Her grip tightened.
"Don't move."
"I wasn't planning to."
It was a lie.
Or perhaps it wasn't.
He genuinely couldn't remember what he had been planning.
Her eyes flickered toward the space beneath his feet.
Then back to his face.
"You're standing on the edge."
"Yes," he replied. "I've noticed."
"Then could you—" Her voice caught. She swallowed. "Could you please come back?"
He considered the request.
It was reasonable.
Most requests involving the preservation of one's life generally were.
But the missing memories troubled him.
He remembered the staircase.
The corridor.
The door.
Then nothing.
He had lost himself again.
And if he admitted that, if he told another adult that he had somehow wandered onto a rooftop without knowing how or why, there would be questions.
Doctors.
Medication.
White walls.
A third admission to a psychiatric ward.
He had promised himself there would never be a third.
His gaze returned to the courtyard.
For one terrible moment, the prospect of simply not having to explain anything seemed easier.
A tear slipped down his cheek.
He was surprised by it.
He hadn't realized he was crying.
He wasn't even certain what he felt.
Fear?
Despair?
Disappointment?
Perhaps the most humiliating part was that even here, standing on the edge of a building, he was attempting to approach his circumstances with some semblance of rationality.
As though death were another examination question.
As though there were a correct answer waiting to be shaded.
"Ikaris?"
He almost asked her to let go.
The words formed somewhere behind his teeth.
But before he could speak, she moved.
Not gracefully.
Certainly not intelligently.
She stepped forward, nearly lost her balance, and wrapped both arms around his waist with a determination entirely disproportionate to her size.
"No," she whispered.
He stiffened.
"Sabina—"
"No."
Her voice cracked.
"I don't know what's happening. I don't know why you're here, and I know you're probably going to hate me for this, but I'm not letting go."
She pulled.
He could have resisted.
That was the peculiar thing.
He knew he was stronger.
He knew he could have remained exactly where he stood.
Instead, he allowed himself to move.
One foot found the rooftop.
Then the other.
Her heel caught against the uneven concrete.
They fell together.
Hard.
The impact knocked the air from his lungs.
For several seconds, neither spoke.
Then—
"You're pretty strong for a weak person," Ikaris observed.
She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob, knowing what kind of bruises to expect in the morning due to having taken too many tumbles.
"That doesn't even make sense."
"Most things don't."
He stared upward.
The sun hung above them, magnificent and indifferent.
For some reason, he thought of fire.
Of wings.
Of a name that had never quite felt like his own.
He wondered how close he had come to burning beneath its beauty.
"Thank you, Sabina."
Beside him, she remained perfectly still.
He repeated. "Thank you very much, Sabina Wells."
A pause.
"It's…"
He turned his head.
"What?"
She looked away.
Even after everything, she seemed embarrassed.
"My name."
He waited.
"It's Isabella," she said quietly.
He frowned.
"Isabella?"
"Isabella Swan."
She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, then immediately looked as though she regretted speaking.
"You've been calling me Sabina Wells for almost a year."
Ikaris stared.
"And you never corrected me?"
"I tried."
"When?"
"A few times." She hesitated. "Mostly at the beginning."
He searched his memory.
Nothing.
"We were assigned as partners in eight grade," she continued. "You never really talked to me. Not unless you needed something."
"That sounds like me."
"And I thought you were ignoring me on purpose."
"That also sounds like me."
She glanced at him.
The faintest smile appeared.
"I didn't know you had trouble reading."
His expression changed.
She noticed immediately.
Of course she did.
"I wasn't spying," she added quickly. "I just noticed you sometimes looked at things for a long time. And you never seemed to read the questions before answering them."
He said nothing.
"So I started writing my name on the papers I gave you. I thought maybe you'd notice eventually."
A strange silence settled between them.
Ikaris looked at her.
Really looked.
Not at the girl his mind had constructed from half-understood letters and convenient assumptions.
At the girl who had been sitting behind him for nearly a year.
Quietly helping.
Quietly watching.
Quietly waiting to be acknowledged.
His thoughts rearranged themselves.
SABINA WELLS.
SABI à ISAB, WELLSàELLSW, ISABELLSW (AN) à ISABELLA SWAN
ISABELLA SWAN.
The letters were not quite the same.
But the resemblance was close enough to disturb him.
Had his mind simply invented the difference?
Had he been reading her name incorrectly all this time?
Or had reality, once again, decided to rearrange itself when he wasn't paying attention?
He laughed.
A small, exhausted sound.
She looked concerned.
"What's funny?"
"Nothing."
"That didn't sound like nothing."
"Trust me. It's better that way."
He extended his hand toward her.
She looked at it suspiciously.
Then at him.
"What?"
He smiled.
Not the practiced expression he wore when pretending to be normal.
Something smaller.
Something genuine.
"Nice to meet you for the first time, Isabella Swan."
She hesitated.
Then took his hand.
"Nice to meet you too, Ikaris."
And for the first time in two weeks, the world remained exactly where it was supposed to be.
At least, for the moment.