keyboard violence
hehe haha
it's called that in my docs LMAO. it just be a lil funky thing i wrote when i was sixteen 
tw for terminal illness and stuffs yeeeeeeee
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
tw for terminal illness and stuffs yeeeeeeee
He meets her in a café.
She is not the first and she will not be the last, but she is different, unique, and he knows the moment he sees her that she will break his heart.
She’s new. He can tell because she looks stressed as hell, clumsily preparing a customer’s order and following after her more experienced coworker like a lost puppy. Her blonde hair is in disarray, looking more like hay than anything that belongs on a person’s head. Strands of gold have slipped free of her ponytail, cascading behind her like the path of water on too-shallow streams. Her eyes are wide with something akin to hysteria, rings of blue darting to every corner of the small space behind the counter.
She looks like she’s on the verge of a mental breakdown.
She has also not noticed him standing directly in front of her. He’s been staring at her for the past ten seconds now.
Make that fifteen.
Now twenty.
He clears his throat, loudly, pursing his lips against a smile when she jumps out of her skin. She straightens up, wheezes through a breath of air, and barely has the mind to put on agrimacesmile before she sucks in another harsh breath through gritted teeth and says, “Hi, howareyoudoinghowmayItakeyourorder?”
He blinks, eyebrows disappearing behind his bangs.
She huffs out a pained chuckle. “S-Sorry,” she tacks on, wringing her hands together behind her back—a common nervous gesture. “I… I’m new. Like, very. Real— Really, really new. Ha.” She shakes her head, as if to scramble her mind back into working order, and yanks her hands up to grip either side of the register. “Yeah, you-you probably knew that. Uhm… Right. Order. What… What can I get you, sir?” Her eyes widen impossibly further at that, and she hurries to correct herself: “I-I mean… Sir, right? It’s… Uhm. I didn’t mean to-to assume or anything. I—”
This time, he can’t stop his laugh. He tries to hide it by clearing his throat again, but the way her face twists into a pout (Adorable, comes an unbidden thought) proves he failed.
“You’re fine,” he says. Despite already knowing exactly what he wants, he allows his eyes to stray back to the menu on the wall behind her, letting his gaze linger in however much time it’ll take for the poor girl to get herself back together. When the student behind him starts tapping an impatient rhythm on the counter, he says, “I’d like one of your soy iced vanilla lattes. Eight shots of espresso, seven packs of sugar, three creams. Largest size. Maybe add in some caramel, I’ve…”
His eyes return to her.
She’s staring at him in a daze. Probably has been for longer than socially acceptable. Not that he’s one to say, considering he’d done so for longer when she was zoned out behind the register.
“What,” is all she says.
His lips curl into a smile. This might take a while.
—————————————
“What’s your name?” she asks, marker in shaky hand and cup in other shaky hand.
“Sage,” he says.
“Oh, cool,” she replies. “I’m Zoey.” The introduction is brief, automatic, off-handed. She’s stumbling away through his order before he gets the chance to comment, to tell her that it’s a nice name.
Zoey. It’s Greek and stands for “life,” appropriately representing “eternal life.” If she wasn’t spilling coffee grains all over the floor, he’d tell her that it was ironic, considering that she’ll die within the next three years.
——————————————————————————————
Sage spends a lot of his time in cafés. The popular ones, especially—the ones always bustling with people. You’d expect someone like him to be on the opposite side of reality from anything that breathes, but Sage has learned that avoidance leads to nothing. The inevitability of outliving everyone is just that—inevitable. To try escaping fate is a feat reserved for fools, after all, and Sage’s curse of an immortal body and a mortal heart is something he must simply accept.
Though if he hadn’t the knowledge of when and how everyone he will ever come to love will die, then perhaps keeping himself sane throughout the years would be more… manageable. Perhaps if the countdown was not reserved only for those he is destined to love but for everyone, he wouldn’t be as broken. But for him to see numbers hovering over people he wouldn’t bat an eye at otherwise, for him to be told who he is to love and for how long he is capable of loving them...
It hurts.
Alas, the world despises everyone unfairly and unequally, and Sage is no exception. He can only live. Forever, in an eternal cycle of heartbreak.
“Do you believe in soulmates?” Zoey asks him one day.
Sage sometimes finds it amusing how his younger self wouldn’t be here with her. He was harsh and bitter then, unwilling to accept what had happened, what he had done to himself, froth dusting his lips as he snapped at anyone who dared to get close, afraid to get his spirit torn to pieces again. Because there was always something to tear, he found out eventually, no matter how empty he felt.
But now, Sage is too tired to be at war. Let the world be cruel. Sage knows that she only has so much time, so he might as well make the most of it.
Sage is allowing himself to fall, is the one pushing to be closer, is someone who wants to love. Perhaps it's delusion. Perhaps it’s a mistake. Perhaps he has grown so used to the pain that he now actively seeks it. Perhaps he’s lost his mind. The details are irrelevant.
Sage has chosen to approach Zoey, ignored the numbers floating above her strawberry-blonde head, and has said, a gentle smile on his lips, “I’d like to get to know you better.”
And he has. He wants to know everything about her. He’s too old to continue drowning in regrets.
In the past year he’s spent listening to her every word, he’s learned so much. She likes the color brown, prefers cats over dogs, and killed a cactus when she was thirteen. She has a family: an annoying older brother named Zach and a mother named Zaira. She considers it creative that their names begin with the letter Z. She has a crush on her classmate, Elijah, but can’t bring herself to confess. She spends so much time reading fanfiction and binge-watching anime that she worries she no longer has a life.
She wants to be a fashion designer. She wants to go to France. She wants to marry the stranger she met at a bus stop when she was fifteen years old. She wants to summon the courage to write her number on a napkin for a cute customer. She wants to get enough money to buy a house by the ocean. She wants three cats. She wants a good husband. She wants to raise two kids.
She won’t be able to graduate.
Sage wants to be young again. He wants his anger back so he can curse the world for everything it’s done. It would be a human thing to do.
He thinks being human again would be quite nice.
“Sage?” she prompts, and when his eyes clear and he snaps back to attention, she only smiles endearingly at him, rolling her eyes as she inhales what’s left of her watermelon slushy—her favorite.
“Sorry,” he says. He isn’t. She’s used to this by now. He curls the edge of his lip the tiniest bit, tilts his head in a way that would make many swoon. “I was busy admiring your eyes. They’re quite beautiful, you know? Ravishing, almost. Do you know of the word ‘pulchritudinous?’ Well, I must say that those rings upon your pupils are most effervescent azure—”
She merely rolls those beautiful eyes again, unfazed. He knows she does not love him romantically, so he does not love her romantically either. He thinks he lost all ability to love someone that way. He thinks he’s going to lose all ability to love at all. But Sage needs to have fun sometimes or he’d lose his mind.
“Flirt,” she accuses.
“If the shoe fits.”
She pops another of the café’s crackers in her mouth. Not the crackers sold at the café she works at, mind. The ones at the rival café are better, she says, bold traitor that she is, so she always drags him here whenever she’s on break for the “superior treats.”
(“Isn’t there some kind of unwritten law that prohibits baristas from ordering from their employer’s greatest fiends?” Sage had commented when they took their place at the end of the line.
Zoey simply huffed and turned to tell him, “Last I checked, no one gives ten shits about me wearing a Café le Restaurant apron at Grains de Café.” He’s always thought the names uncreative. “I’m free to come and go as I please… On break, of course.”
Sage leaned down their six-inch height difference to conspiratorially whisper, “That barista is side-eyeing you. Perhaps he’s dredging up a contingency plan to eliminate his vile competition.”
Zoey punched his shoulder. Hard. Enough for him to flinch, actually, and it made him happy, seeing that she was still so strong. “Shut,” she said, “and stop talking like you were born in the late Victorian Era… or some… overly pretentious, nerdy madman. You’re making me feel decades younger than you. I'm pretty sure our age difference is only four years, not four centuries.”
Sage only smiled.)
Now, at the table farthest from everyone else, with another ten minutes left of her break, she adds, impolitely (her mouth is very much full), “You haven’t answered my question.”
“Hmm?”
“Yep,” she goes on. “Do you believe in soulmates?”
He arches his brow. “What brought this on?”
“I read too much fanfiction,” she answers curtly. “Now, c’mon, tell me, tell me, tell—”
“Alright, alright,” he says. “No need to get so rowdy.”
“Ew. I hate that word. You should die.”
She’s so silly sometimes.
He makes a show of thinking, and she leans forward, impatient. Hand on his chin and forehead creased, he makes a low, noncommittal hum, and says, “No.”
I believe in doomed souls, he never says. Souls that split each other apart.
Her eyebrows fly into the heavens. “Wellllll, okaayyyy,” she says. “Ignorance. ‘Tis ignorance that makes you think such, surely. I’m fixing that. What if I tell you all about them—” she glances at her watch— “with the seven minutes I have until I go back to being a suffering member of society? Maybe I can convince you that they exist, hmm?”
He chuckles. “Sure.”
At that, she lifts her cup of hot chocolate (she ordered it despite Sage’s warning that it doesn’t mix well with watermelon slushies) in an offer for a toast, just because she can. He humors her, again, his own mug of hot chocolate clinking gently against hers. She tips her head back and chugs it all down like some sort of drunkard.
She could drink if she wanted to, he thinks. Alcohol, that is. Today’s her twenty-first birthday. She could do whatever she wanted, including getting piss-drunk. She has time.
She has a year and a half to live.
————————————————
She calls him one day and says she’s having trouble. For a second, his heart sinks, and he thinks that this is it, that she’ll start wilting now, but then she tells him that the issue pertains to her rent and his lungs start working again. She’s not having trouble with her health. For now.
Her mother ran into financial problems, she explains, and there’s a risk that Zoey’s going to lose her apartment right across the block from her university. So, like the weak man that he is, Sage immediately offers to be her roommate. They’ll share the rent, he says. There’s a pause at the end of the line, a silence filled only by his hasty clarification that he’d very much like to get out of the little hole-in-the-wall condo he rents near the bank he works at anyway.
It takes minutes of bargaining for her to accept that he’ll do anything to help her. Still, she demands that he only pay a third of her rent; she’ll work overtime at the café to have enough to pay the rest.
He agrees and moves in within two days.
She’s too trusting, sometimes. But at least he’ll be there when she goes.
He also can’t have her exhausted and stressed in the last year of her life, so he pays for ten years worth of rent.
She punches him in the shoulder for that, both out of anger because he broke his promise and out of shock because she wasn’t expecting him to have so much money. Not that he can blame her, considering how he dresses like a twenty-five-year-old homeless college student. She wasn’t expecting him to be such a fully functional member of society.
He’s almost offended. Sure, he might be radiating the aura of someone in dire need of happiness and success, but that only makes him better, more useful, doesn’t it?
He tells her such, but she only punches him again.
Her fists don’t do quite as much damage as they used to.
She’s getting weaker.
———————————————
Ten months before she dies, during summer, Sage takes her everywhere. The both of them stroll through parks, taste-test every item in every café, get drunk and subsequently banned in eleven clubs. He takes her to another state, drags her to two beaches, forces her to socialize and make more friends and stop being a frightened little cat and date someone (ahem. Elijah. Ahem) for once in her life, for the love of everything holy he learned about back in the eighteen hundreds.
She has fun. Later, when they’re on the Greyhound, tired from all the action, she wiggles out of her newfound boyfriend's arms, stalks over to where he sits alone in the back of the bus, and punches his shoulder in greeting.
Before he gets the chance to whine about bruises and absurdly strong stick-like limbs, she takes his hand in hers, and says, “Thank you.”
———————————————
Zoey tells him, one day, that she’s having a hard time breathing. She wheezes at the end of every breath, and her movements are sluggish, slow. He tells her to go to the doctor.
She doesn’t. It’s seasonal allergies, she tells him.
She loses weight. Her cheeks hollow out and her clothes cling loosely to her frame. He tells her to go to the doctor.
She doesn’t. She’ll just eat more, she promises him, but she’s lost her appetite. She’s stopped going to the rival café during her breaks.
She complains of a stomach ache that won’t leave. He tells her, again, to go to the doctor.
She doesn’t. Painkillers exist for a reason, she says.
Two months later, she develops a fever that won’t go away. It’s not that bad, she says, and is likely just a result of the stress that comes with final exams.
He tells her to go to the doctor.
She doesn’t.
The fever worsens. Her skin goes yellow and clammy, sweat on her brow even when sat down. He tells her, gently, to schedule an appointment at the doctor.
She doesn’t.
It’s not until three weeks later, after she faints in the middle of class, that she walks up to him, blanched and wide-eyed, and asks, voice shaking, not out of difficulty breathing but of fear that doesn’t fit her face, “Sage, will you come with me to the hospital?”
He nods. The only emotion he has to fake is surprise. The fear, concern, sadness—they carry off him in waves, without his permission.
—————————————
“Have you told your boyfriend that you’re…?” He trails off when he sees the look on her face in his rearview mirror. Ah, well, he understands why she won’t yet tattle; Elijah is fiercely overprotective of her, and the moment he even learns of something off, he… will react passionately. “Your friends?” he suggests. Jonathan, Katherine, Kaitlyn, and Lisa—they’ll all want to know…
She shakes her head. “They’ll lose their shit.” She sounds tired. She sounds like she can’t breathe. “You’re the calmest one, y’know? And… I… Yeah.”
She needs him there to ground her, is what she doesn’t say. If she brought anyone else into this, their panic, their inexperience in handling these sorts of things, will only feed into hers.
Sage heaves out a sigh.
She should tell them. He should tell her to tell them. They deserve to know. But that would only cause her more stress, wouldn’t it? She shouldn’t be stressed when she’s going to die soon.
Decisions, decisions.
When they stop at a red light, he reaches back, nearly dislocating his shoulder in the process, but the smile she gives him as she holds his hand tightly makes the pain worth it.
He glances up at the little number floating above her head.
She has three months left to live.
———————————————
“You have three months left to live,” the doctor tells her a week later. “Give or take. Maybe more, maybe less.”
It’s gotten bad, the doctor says. Zoey waited too long. It’s gotten bad. It’s metastasized to her liver, spread to more than six lymph nodes. She’s going to die. She’s going to die—soon.
The doctor starts going over possible treatments. Zoey could try chemotherapy, radiation therapy, stem-cell. There’s a low survival rate, the doctor says, but she could still try. She could try. There’s a chance.
The countdown says otherwise.
Zoey says, “Are there ways to make it painless?”
The doctor’s eyes are like his, Sage thinks. They’re too haunted, too desensitized. They saw too much too soon, he thinks. And the doctor smiles just like he does, too—gently, tenderly, a little too sadly. The doctor speaks like him, low and comforting and soft—how everyone does when faced with someone who’s going to die.
“Yes,” the doctor says.
Zoey nods. “Okay,” she says, over and over.
She sounds too calm.
She’ll break when Sage drives her home.
—————————————
“Sage,” she whispers.
Sage doesn’t cry anymore.
No matter how many times he and the ones he’s come to know may try, his eyes have stayed dry. Oh, how the people tried. They’ve shown him the saddest of movies, read him hundreds of tragedies, and they could only gape as Sage sat there in front of them, unmoved. “It’s like you’re not human,” some have said. “Are you dead inside or something?” others have asked.
Perhaps, he never said. I died when I became immortal, after all.
“Sage,” Zoey whispers again, her hands curled into the fabric of his shirt in a white-knuckled grip, and Sage looks at her, paying attention now. “Sage, I don’t want to die.”
He knows.
“Sage, I-I don’t… Sage, I don’t.”
He knows. He knows, Zoey, he knows.
Her eyes are like faucets. An odd simile, he thinks. It’s a little funny.
“Sage,” she chokes, “I have so much to live for.”
Her breath stutters, and he almost frets, almost tells her to hush, because she’s only going to make breathing harder.
“Elijah… Elijah was pla-planning to take me to his parents. I-I’m— I was— Jonathan and Lisa, they… My friends… We were planning… I was going to go with them, Sage, to-to… Sage, I can’t die yet; I have to graduate. I can’t die. I don’t want to die.”
He knows.
“I have to graduate. I have to go to France. My brother— I have to annoy him more because that’s what little sisters do, and my brother has to annoy me because he’s my big brother and-and my mom, Sage, I can’t leave her, I can’t leave my mom and… Sage, I’ve barely lived.”
“I know, Zoey,” he tells her.
She cries herself to sleep.
——————————————
“Sage,” she says as he’s making her breakfast. He tried making her coffee, earlier, the way she’d taught him a week after her diagnosis, but he can’t make anything as good as hers, so he gave up and turned to whipping up pancakes instead.
“Yes?” he prompts.
“Can you tell them?”
Sage flips over the pancakes. “Tell who? Tell them what?” he asks.
“My family,” she explains. “My friends. Elijah. Can you tell them what happened to me? When I’m gone, can you tell them?”
Sage layers the pancakes with salted butter, because she thinks plain butter is too boring. “You’re going to wait that long?” he prods, gently, like always.
“Yes.” Her answer is firm. She’s unyielding, like that. Her final wish is almost cruel.
“You don’t want to tell them yourself?” He pours the slightest bit of maple syrup on the pancakes. She doesn’t like her breakfast too sweet.
“No.”
He sighs, turns around with the plate in hand, and gives her a fork and a bread knife and some extra butter.
He already has hundreds of burdens on his shoulders. What’s one more going to do?
“Okay,” he promises. “Okay. I’ll tell them.”
She cries, again. Sage has a feeling that she’ll cry a lot.
———————————————
She drops out of university. A day after that, she breaks up with Elijah. She stops all contact with her friends, ignoring their calls and demanding Sage be quiet when they come knocking on their door. When her mother leaves her angry, concerned voicemails demanding an answer, and when her brother won’t stop texting, she throws her phone across the room and watches it shatter against the wall. And a day later, two weeks before she dies, she marches up to Sage, tears in her eyes and venom on her tongue, but he hugs her before she gets the chance to push him away.
“I’m stubborn, Zoey,” he says. “Really, really stubborn. No matter what you do, I’m always going to be right here.”
I’m too used to this to leave, he never says. There is a lot he has never said, will never say. I’m too used to losing to fear losing you.
She lifts her hand up, curls it into a fist, and punches his shoulder. It doesn’t hurt at all.
“Why?” she demands. Her voice breaks. She is angry, so angry, and Sage hates her—for just a moment—because he didn’t want her to change. He wanted her to be… her, even in the end.
“I’m not leaving,” he says. “You can’t make me. I paid the rent here, didn’t I? I’m not going to leave the place I paid for.”
“Idiot,” she snarls. His shirt is damp now. A shame. He’d just washed it.
“I know.”
“You’re such an idiot.”
“I know.”
————————————
One week, six days, five days, three days. She’ll be gone—soon.
Two days before she dies, she dives nose-deep into her designs. She draws anything, everything. Elegant dresses, chic skirts, sumptuous gowns. She fills two notebooks within ten hours. Sage doesn’t bother her, just gives her whatever she asks of him.
“You know,” Zoey says, watching him sharpen her pencil, “you remind me of a dog.”
That forces a bark of laughter out of him. The sound makes her smile.
It’s a nice smile, but he hates it anyway, hates it in a way that doesn’t feel like hatred, hates it in a way that doesn’t feel like anything at all.
“Sure,” he says.
“You do. You’re a dog.”
“Not really.”
“Ignorance,” she says. “‘Tis ignorance that makes you think such.”
He gives her the pencil. “Okay.”
“You’re a dog. Woof, woof.” She swallows. “You’re very loyal.”
His eyes crinkle fondly. “Not really.”
She starts sketching.
————————————
One day, two hours, three minutes before she dies, she leans across her bed and lightly taps his nose to get his attention. She leans back, panting, because so much as lifting her arm is exhausting now. “Get me some coffee,” she says between breaths. Then, she tacks on, just because she can, “Like a good li’l’ boy.”
“Okay,” he tells her.
He pretends he doesn’t notice the empty bottle of painkillers by her nightstand.
He waits before he walks through her bedroom door. Waits, because she might just tell him she loves him. Waits, because he would tell her that he loves her right back if she so much as opened her mouth.
She doesn't.
She won’t even give him the chance to say goodbye, will she?
Oh, well.
———————————
He doesn’t get coffee. He leaves, shuts the door, and leans against the wall.
And waits.
The countdown doesn’t strike zero. It never does. It just disappears.
————————————————————————————————————
Sage meets him at a grocery store, this time.
He is not the first and he will not be the last, but he is different, unique, and Sage sees a little number floating above a mop of red hair and knows that his heart will break again.
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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