CLOSED ✖ camoflaged by all the fallen leaves a hand holds up the sky while shamefully i make my plea

[mangemouth]

CHARACTERS: mangemouth & ruineaxt.
LOCATION/SETTING: In a tree right on the edge of the forest. Noooot quite in it, yet...
DATE & TIME: Friday afternoon, shortly after classes.
WARNINGS: Smoking, language, p...ossible drug references and such?
SUMMARY: Badou and Shinjiro have a sort of routine: they show up, they smoke, Badou complains about his everyday, mundane

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[mangemouth]

[from the other side of the tree, with the trunk dividing them, Badou's jaw twitches like it'd been struck and his teeth chattersnap shut]

[no. it ain't just today. but Badou thinks about yesterday, of all those yesterdays some four years ago that he had someone to look out for him, that he'd had someone (whose opinion he actually cared about) telling him to stop smoking and get better and get lost all at once]

[he remembers before, when his eyes were still droopy, but there were two of them, and he could see a tall man with a broad back and the same fiery orange hair without squinting]

[Badou's never asked about the discoloration on Shinjiro's arm, the blue turning to black and abscessing red]

[Shinjiro's never asked about the black shadow over Badou's right eye, what once was green spilled over with that inky, charcoal patch]

Nah, it ain't ever been.

[it's a sober agreement, and the teen grinds his cigarette out in the same spot on the tree's trunk that he always has, where he's started a great welt on the bark]

[they're hurting it, too.]

Our host might, though.

[he still doesn't]

[he misses skyscrapers.]