Chapter Text
Fretful, young eyes the color of golden brown maintained contact with the wide cork of a medium-sized jar, some strands of black sliding onto them. Whitened knuckles clenched the said jar, clammily trying to stabilize themselves. With words that stuttered and stumbled out of the shy boy, he fought for air as he continued to speak through limitations that bound him to his own mind.
“For you…”
A taller boy whose glasses brightly reflected the remaining rays of the sun sat next to him. He stared back at the other with a small smile of friendliness, causing the band-aid that stuck protectively on his right cheek to slightly lift. While he sat comfortably on the front step of a tall but simple house, in comparison the one next to him shrunk in nervousness, waiting for an answer that he hoped would not be of rejection.
“Me? Thanks a bunch, I really like it!” Glasses giggled in excitement. He accepted the jar when it was sheepishly offered to him, observing it with wonder. “Wowie…it’s awfully big. Am I s’pposed to catch Godzilla with it or…?” he jokes, his childish laugh resonating through the timid soul of the quiet boy.
“…it’s because—” Shy realized what he said after the words came out and quickly tried to persevere, opening his mouth with emptiness following shortly after. Closing it in defeat, the reason needn’t be said for there isn’t one that he could think of nor properly formulate into words.
As he recomputed the purpose carefully in his head, the other continued to gawk at the jar with lively blue eyes behind their rectangular frames. They slid down on his nose during examination, turning the said jar sideways and such, and thus making the contents inside it tumble around.
“So, what’s it for?” he urged, a charming smile slipping onto his young features. Finally it seemed that the raven-haired boy had an answer, for his gaze returned back to Glasses. Instead of finding the why, he decided on its what instead.
“Paper stars,” said Shy with resolution.
“Paper stars, huh?” mused the jar’s new owner, “Then I’m guessing that the stuff inside is the strips you use to make them. I’ve heard of the story that if you fill the jar, you get a wish…right?”
Shy nodded, the dark fringes that accentuated his face jumping along with his movement. Smiling ever so faintly, Glasses caught notice of this and proceeded to display a toothy grin, happy that he managed to open him up a little. His band-aid raised quite a distance.
“That’s so cool!! But wait…” his face dropped the smile for a second. “I can’t fill the jar with just these strips…oh, gosh darn it. There goes my wish.”
The other spoke up so as to reciprocate the favor, “Well…if you want, I’ll send you more…” he nodded in certainty, “…just mail me when you need them…!” His stare persisted with the downtrodden boy so that he saw his usual optimistic nature quickly come back.
“Good idea…now I can’t wait to fill this up!” Glasses exclaimed with his smile steadily growing. “The day I stop asking for strips is the day I stop being friends with you!”
Echoes of a faraway past evaporated into the air without a trace, now morphing into a moving photograph of history. It flew away, out the window of a blurred classroom, and into the azureness of the sky. The origin of this photograph remained static amongst the quick scribbling of other students that mimicked the words on the board up ahead. An outlier from the uniformity, he preferred to drift into other minuscule nonsense as he had already gotten the work done in advance.
Narrowed, wary eyes the color of darkly dulled brown gazed into oblivion, the desk being its only borders. Slender fingers lightly held on to the edge of a pencil that tapped into the black locks of its possessor, tuning out everything beyond his mental state. With thoughts that slid and flowed through the mind of the calculating teen, he bit his lip as he pushed on remembering the final words that bled on the notebook he had written before him.
Eventually, he placed the pencil down and laid his head lazily on his arm.
“The day I stop asking for strips is the day I stop being friends with you!”
Well, you stopped asking for strips years ago, he said in his mind.