Day 27 - Beach

One advantage of Alvis's boots (pants? bootpants? the age-old tritest triangulation) was that they were all but impervious to encroaching sand grains, on the beach where he and Shulk walked.

Shulk's bulky rubber boots, with their stabilizing braces round the ankles, invited lump after lump of shoreside debris into their sweaty recesses, and eventually Shulk shucked them off, using the straps of the braces as handles by which to keep hold of the shoes as they continued their promenade.

Then the vest. Then the sleeves, rolled up.

"I suppose I feel pretty underdressed, now," Shulk said with an almost-embarrassed laugh. "You're so...suave, and formal."

"Oh?" Alvis quirked an inquisitive, enigmatic brow. "And here I thought I was being inconspicuous."

"You couldn't be less, Alvis. You're quite eye-catching."

"I'm quite overdressed," Alvis corrected him.

"Maybe, maybe. If clothes have to be a metaphor for how open you are, to me."

Shulk didn't think he could place a time in the weeks, months past when he'd seen Alvis heave a genuine sigh. There were sighs of faux insult, and sighs of carefully-placed beats in the conversation, but never...weariness.

Oh. Alvis had to be very, very weary. All the more appropriately due for a stroll on the beach, but still. It stood to reason, didn't it? Perhaps it was hard to sigh, when you were all literally buttoned-up like that.

So Alvis sighed. Shulk watched him, with those keen blue eyes.

"I am trying my best."

"You know I believe you."

"The point of asserting what I do or do not know is...?"

"Arrogant presumption," was Shulk's answer, in a dramatic copy of Alvis's usual velvet tone. "I love your voice," he added.

"I shall endeavor to let you hear it ever more."

"You mean you'll try, Alvis?"

"I'll try. Shulk."