don't you worry, turn around (i will still be here)

Recommended Listening: Auresco Night

Auresco's architecture is a pleasing, eclectic mix of jade and gold modern structures alongside homey stone buildings that crumble slightly every time they catch the light of your eyes.

In comparison to Indol, obviously, it's quite new and different. Even the most avant-garde places, with windows cut in geometric shapes and surrounding details minimized so as to create a new superpositional façade over their familiar function, still maintain an air of genuine impression, of striving toward excellence with a smile in your pocket for those you can't wait to show your results to.

The engineers are truly a marvel, in this place. Urbane and sophisticated, yet warm and friendly. Sort of self-aware of their idiosyncratic oddity, choosing to erect such structures in which to congregate over tabletop games and poké bowls. Minoth knows one or two, very distantly, and had moved here upon their recommendation, knowing that even the most culture-averse of the eggheads were true to the merits of their fair city.

Addam doesn't live here. He lives in a suburb called Aletta, within the greater Lasaria River Valley region, in an "apartment" that's really just a farmhouse on his board-member father's unwanted property. He doesn't own the place, and he doesn't want to. Still, he owns enough of it to invite Minoth over, and Minoth has been exactly once.

The idea had quite honestly scared him. To visit the home of someone who's so much more settled in his life, and doesn't concern himself with hiding everything at square corners and edges when company's coming?

Something he'd gotten from Amalthus, Minoth thinks bitterly. Why did you have to be so all-encompassingly obsessed with hiding yourself from the world? Wasn't it enough just to be successful? Couldn't you share it?

And Minoth isn't even successful. He gets by, as an odd-jobs man and assistant superintendent at Auresco's historical institute, but as yet he hasn't been able to summon the confidence to assume himself capable of actually teaching others about the city's history.

He can tell stories in a way that grabs the attention of everyone present, with ease and passion. That's not the problem. The problem is getting into a conversation with someone who knows the history, inside and out, and will let him get to know about it.

But, no one in Auresco is so granola as to actively pursue communication with a transplant whose eye is scarred, whose ponytail lies completely ungracefully (read: sticks up everywhere), and whose sleeves are fringed.

Addam is. Addam is exactly granola enough. But Addam comes with other baggage. Namely, Addam makes Minoth's palms sweaty and his nervous-twitch leg bounce incontrovertibly pronounced. Every moment spent with the positively princely golden boy of suburbia makes Minoth cringe, internally, at how he must be wasting the opportunity he'll never be brave enough to take.

He has convinced himself that it is an opportunity, at least. He has been able to admit to himself that he would like to start seeing himself with Addam, forever.

However, that would require reconciling all the events of his past that have caused him to get so shaky now, in the present day, and Minoth's not sure he'll ever be able to do that. Maybe one day someone online will pick up on his writing talent, and then he can travel the world working from "home" and never thinking about Addam again.

Ideal, honestly.

(Not.)

Minoth shuffles his way down a rainy eastern street in the early morning, trying not to let himself spiral down useless trails of thought about how he'll correct his sleep schedule after that unexpected night shift. Nights like this are a boon in that he doesn't have to talk to anyone, but they royally suck in every other observable dimension, because he doesn't get to talk to anyone, free food is an obvious nix, and it might as well be a placebo dose of seasonal depression.

Addam would have stayed at the institute with him all night, without a single question. Addam is game for stupid stuff like that, just about always. He doesn't send Minoth earnest messages asking about attendance for this event or that, whether in the city or the country, all too often, lately, because Minoth has been on a steady track of trimming at least one text per conversation, until it's only Addam popping an option up and Minoth weakly turning it down, without even an "Oh, alright, then." to punctuate.

This is the beginning of the rest of his life, huh? This is what it's like, post-Amalthus. He's out, and he doesn't really care. He likes his independence, but he hates his despondence.

Just there, a shallow puddle presents itself with view to the muck, and Minoth doesn't even bother stepping around it. Why would he? Of course it's there. Of course he doesn't care.

The sun threatens to rise before he makes it back to his apartment for the three-flight climb, which is irritating, in a compulsion sense, but...doesn't matter, does it?

He could get food of some kind, since in a city like this so departed from Indol's bare austerity there's bound to be something, even just a convenience store, open at...what, quarter past six?

But then he'd have to go to the ATM. What a drag. Not even about money coming out. Just...

Just as much trouble as stepping around a stranger on the corner, except you have to step around strangers, unless they step around you first.

Huh. Minoth drags his eyes up from the cobbles when he doesn't see the shoes in front of him start to move. Nice oxfords, but polka-dot socks. A finance plant in one of the startup tech companies dotting the high-rises, probably. Out early for trading. Doesn't it all just fit?

(That's the problem: Minoth would like, would love, to just so trendily explain himself, but he can't. Illogic and unpresentability hound him wherever he goes.)

Begrudgingly, and with a rotten sigh, Minoth follows his eyes up the oxfords' legs as he slows his somehow not already snailbound pace. Did he drop something? Has he been splashing? Did a chunk of his hair fall out, sometime, during the night?

However fortunately or unfortunately, the stranger isn't actually a stranger. He's wearing a varsity jacket and plain black underlayer, and even the finance jokers don't wear that.

Addam's gaze is just as sharp-eyed keen in the haze of muggy morning as it is in the dry evenings at the gate to the suburbs where he picks Minoth up in an antique car. Had picked him up, the once.

"Fancy meeting you here, Prince," Minoth says, for lack of anything else.

Addam nods, seemingly in attempt to be encouraging. "I'm glad to see you, too."

Considering his options more clearheadedly, if he can summon the power (and the sun has risen, hasn't it, so maybe that's easier or maybe it's harder), Minoth realizes that there are much more unsafe options for rogue streetcorner encounters. This, still, is an exertion.

It's tiring to have to be looked after like he's in some situation of danger to himself, and no others, even though he has a job and he has food and his clothes are clean (better than, they're hand-maintained, and Addam knows this). Everything should be fine. Everything is fine!

But Addam looks upset, doesn't he?

Gesturing with a hand jammed into jacket pocket but trying to minimize the sway of the fringe, Minoth asks, "There something special bringing you in here at the very crack?" He doesn't say "my fair city" or even "our fair city", because if he actually felt that way, he'd be making a lot more, and talking a lot more, down at the institute.

"Oh, that." Addam waves a noncommittal hand, possibly still somewhere toward the high-rises whose lights are flickering not because the traders are in but because those are apartments, actually, and even Minoth knows that. "Business for my father. Someone's got to do it."

"Doesn't have to be you," Minoth says with a hint of reproach, because as tirelessly (well, no, quite tirely) as he'd sacrificed his own self for Amalthus's needs for so many years, he'd never done it because he thought someone needed to. He did it because he didn't have anything else available for him to do with his own life, and look at him now - he's still not doing anything worthwhile.

Whatever business it is Khanoro has with Aurescan high-rises, it doesn't concern the oversight of farmland that Addam actually enjoys.

Addam sighs. See, Prince? This isn't for you.

"Would you believe it if I said I actually came here to see you?"

"I-" Minoth stutters, but recovers quickly enough. "Suppose I would. You've done worse."

"And so have you, but still, I worry."

"Addam..."

And there it is: the first-name basis upon which to rest what must be almost two years of strained half-friendship half-apathaship relations, drained of vigor but fraught with history.

"I want you to be happy, here."

Two years, and it's still more Addam's city than it is Minoth's.

"I am," Minoth lies.

"You're not." Addam's eyes no longer look sharp. "Please listen to me when I tell you that I worry." He seems almost to reach out for Minoth's hands, but stays his own.

No one else is worrying. Malos and Mythra are up to their own devices in campus cafés with free froyo and freer wifi; computer geeks' paradise. Malos might be dating one of the governance-minded type in some quasi-administrative branch of his company, and Mythra - Mythra! - is doing a better job scoping out what she wants to do with her time and life than Minoth is. Meanwhile, he's stuck tending exhibits, with as much "you can look but you can't touch" extended towards himself as towards the institute visitors.

This city has history. Doggone it, it has history! It's not just the lack of driving through semi-suburban geography that has Minoth's eyes somehow closed to it. The architecture compels him, and so do the people, and the composition of social structures, and the university population sway, and...

"Why won't you visit me?"

It's true pleading, in Addam's eyes.

"You know it. I'm staying here because I'm afraid of going outside, not because I love it so much where I am," Minoth admits to the sloshed-over tips of his boots. He can feel his ponytail flop down over his neck, heavy with grease. Even the hair on his arms seems disarrayed beneath his relatively loose jacket sleeves. When had he gotten so careless about...everything?

"But you want to love it, don't you?"

Now Addam has seized at Minoth's elbows, yanking his hands out of jacket, and the flash is back in his eyes.

"We can see it, together! Every square meter! It's not too late."

He pumps excitedly on Minoth's hands, and Minoth tries not to sway too pathetically.

"Please? Will you? With me?"

"That's a lot of driving, for you," Minoth tries weakly. Who would drive that much, spend that much on gas and the deterioration of the environment (Torna has managed to stay ahead of Mor Ardain, but for how much longer?), all for a man who can't even keep himself put together? One person, and not even a career!

"Isn't your apartment one bedroom?"

"Yes..." Minoth replies warily.

"Rather than a studio, I mean," Addam clarifies, still not letting go. "I wouldn't have to drive so much. I could..." He takes a stiff breath, but lets it out much more haphazardly. "I could stop working for my father. Forever."

"Let me get this straight." But Minoth doesn't pull himself back, either. "You want to move in...with me?"

He needn't enumerate all the issues with that. Plainly Addam already knows.

"That's the least of what I want."

Can it really be called apathy if you know that there's always been something so crucial missing?

"Okay," says Minoth, now for a completely different lack of anything else.

It takes Addam's hand snaking gently into the opening in his unzippered jacket to rest on his chest as he tucks his face behind Minoth's ear for the misplaced cowboy to realize that he could have dreamed much, much bigger than this - and still, not even come close to such a wonderful reality.

Addam nudges him, again gently, but with an inspiring confidence. "Are you hungry?"

Recovered somewhat from his total shock, Minoth answers, "Sure, Addam. I can't tell you what's good, here, so...show me to our new favorite spot."

The debate about just which spot that is lasts another good five years, to start.