return to sender

"Everything okay?"

Mythra felt her lips twist downward, just the slightest, without her bidding. "Yeah, everything- everything's fine, why?"

"You called," replied Minoth. "Usually you text."

She couldn't be sure whether she appreciated or resented Minoth's willingness to point this rarity out. It absolved her, at least temporarily, from actually producing an answer to a "What's up?" that was surely coming, and had been expected at the first. But, of course, it had put Minoth on alert.

Her thumb automatically traveled to her middle and ring finger knuckles, before she slipped the phone down onto her desk and put it on speaker in order to free up both hands to finish processing all eight, twelve, sixteen.

"Mythra?"

"Oh, sorry."

And then the apology lay there, suspended somewhere between Mythra's mouth and the stain-varnished MDF of the flat-pack furniture.

Was that okay? When Minoth said (over and over, sometimes, when Mythra just seemed to buck hopelessly at the thought of getting it) that she could call anytime, for anything, because he trusted her judgement and he knew, because she'd told him, how often she felt alone, with no one on her side, with no one to understand, looking for the corner in a round room and being told by every other and even him, sometimes, that there was where she had to go--

--was this what he had meant?

"What are you doing?"

Mythra said it, and sat on her hands, swallowing through an involuntary wince.

"Trying not to think about death and taxes," came the crackle through cracked screen. "In other words, cleaning out my filing cabinet."

"I thought you didn't have a filing cabinet," said Mythra reproachfully. Minoth had embraced the digital age with a passion, for his writing and for everything else he could manage, and he avoided scrap paper and sketchbooks like the plague. He didn't own a printer - refused to.

"I don't. It's a drawer."

Minoth was voluble in theory, but reticent in practice (maybe vice-versa? it didn't really matter). Mythra could sense herself dying on the vine even as she knew that if Minoth kept talking, rhetoric in rhapsody, she'd just slump closer and closer to abject despair and gripping loneliness.

"Can I come over?"

"If it's worth the drive."

Tapping disjointedly on her phone until it finally woke enough to display the red sigil of silence, Mythra fished for her keys and shuffled out of her apartment, shuddering and gritting her teeth.

Was it worth the drive? Quite possibly not. It was an unsatisfying excursion, in prospect and in practice, just as all else in her life. No warmth settled in her chest; only a dry nausea that would lead to a stilted sort of hyperventilation if she thought too hard about it.

Twenty minutes when she left work early, half an hour if she was none so lucky. At this time of night, probably a cool fifteen. Mythra's leg juddered on the brake pedal, and she had to hope her taillights weren't flickering into the innocent eyes of the lone traveler following behind her.

Minoth's apartment building had no gatehouse, no doorman. Mythra persistently begged off every time he'd offered her a key to either the lobby or his unit, so she expected to have to bear the embarrassment of buzzing in, but to her mild surprise, the doorbell announced her entry immediately after the call was answered.

No words.

Mythra's teeth chattered in the elevator. She felt oddly naked without her Origo Associates tote bag, even though she arrived for work every morning with the minimum kit possible. Here, it was like she'd abandoned her badge and had taken the unwanted key for her carabiner anyway.

But she hadn't. She was just a trade-school gap-year ex-homeschooler limping along without adult supervision in a complex of brick that inspired the worst kind of homesickness.

The elevator groaned its completion. Mythra stepped out. 3D was actually nearer to the stairwell, but Minoth always walked her out to the lift as a point of habit, whether he was exiting the building with her or not, and as she swallowed for the seven(teen)th time that hour Mythra accepted that taking the stairs would have led the bile in her throat to force itself out into the void. Literally - she'd engaged Minoth in a hearty discussion, involving a rabbit hole of Reddit posts, on its proper name some months ago.

The door, predictably, was peeled ajar, but that didn't stop Mythra from pressing gingerly on it as she opened it further. If asked why, she certainly couldn't have provided an answer. It wasn't that she was trying to be stealthy. Or was it? She truly didn't know.

Her eyes swept the room, lit to the same fuzzy dimness as the hall, for the top of a spiky-haired head, but there were no human shapes to be found. Mythra's throat, still threatening, absented itself from the task of calling Minoth's name.

As Mythra set down her wallet, to liberate her dangling arm from a longer-yet lanyard, a shadow emerged from the kitchen with what looked like jerky sticks in hand.

He didn't say anything. Mythra's reconaissance of the playwright's own desk setup revealed no tidily-completed decluttering project, the filing drawer still yawning open. He, unlike her, would never desert duty for a snack at such a time.

But Minoth was standing, with his arms nominally free, so Mythra skirted the kitchen table to get to him, and proved to herself that a single waist-height hug from someone who cared was worth all the stoplights in the world.

"Wasn't sure you were coming."

"Train tracks," Mythra mumbled.

"Speeding, then," Minoth joked. His laughter lifted his chest just enough to set Mythra adrift, and she began sucking back not unwarranted nor inexplicable but broadly unhelpful tears until a hand came pressed to the back of her head, covering her crown.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled again, with just a touch more coherence.

Minoth didn't ask for what, instead rocking her closer. All is forgiven, he might sometimes say. But Mythra didn't really want to be forgiven, right now.