Rick had just said goodbye to a friend from school. ‘Friend’ was a generous term. They hung out every so often but only ever exchanged pleasantries. Surface conversations. They disparaged school and the peers they didn’t like, the world they felt didn’t matter. Rick had once mentioned not wanting to live but it had been laughed off so he started keeping quiet about it. And now with every step that friend had taken away he felt the void creep in. Logically he knew he would see him at school tomorrow, or that he could message him on Discord at any time and get a response, but it still felt empty. His first memory was of the sound of a motorcycle, from when his mother left him on a firehouse doorstep. He only knew that retroactively, but it didn’t mean the feeling hadn’t been real, that the boy, barely a toddler, knew he wasn’t wanted. It had always been there, and had never been wrong.

He wasn’t walking home, or anywhere really, he was just walking. Surrounded by the Vegas crowds and under the Vegas sun and sky the lights from the buildings were white spots of hateful glare, it all flowed around him. His space was there but he might as well not have been. Stopping at a crosswalk, the intrusive thought had the idea to keep going. To annoy someone else at having to have their brakes tested, or whatever, but he brushed it off as he had many times before. His heart pounded as he considered the other night, the motorcycle not of his abandonment but his abandoning. It had been a lucky stroke, a key left in the ignition by a driver stopping for a mere minute to buy cigarettes. He shoplifted some booze and made the attempt, but after all that, here he was like nothing had happened and no one had cared. He didn’t care why or how, that’s just how it was and how it had been.

Across the road and another and another where there were less people he was hungry but didn’t care to eat. He was given food and money but little else. It was all he needed, he guessed was the reason, and that fact did the opposite of push him. The motions, the obligations. It wasn’t a question of if but when, as far as he was concerned. But that was neither here nor there as he passed through a small shopping district, gawking at the last thing he expected to see.

[color=3b9bcd]“What the fuck?!”[/color] Rick called out. Bruce jumped, the thin man in a tank top and sweats despite the desert climate. His eyes went wide behind their glasses at Rick’s call, gawking at him. [color=3b9bcd]“Are you fucking following me? Again?! You got government drones or something?”[/color]

Bruce held up his hands, briefly adjusting his glasses. [color=AF7AC5]“I was just at the gym!”[/color] he waved his hand at the shopping district, one of the signs reading ‘Full Circle Fitness’. [color=AF7AC5]“Uh, my...work physician suggested it. And a couple other things. What are you doing here?”[/color]

Rick looked over the signage but was too lazy to contrive of a lie. [color=3b9bcd]“Nothing.”[/color] The two stared in awkward silence. Bruce tapped his half balled fist loosely against his palm for a few moments while scanning the area.

[color=AF7AC5]“Hey, uh...I still kinda want to talk if you don’t mind.”[/color] Rick felt his insides coil into a ball and didn’t answer. [color=AF7AC5]“But well, I kinda had somewhere to go real quick. Are you doing anything? Would you mind coming to church with me real quick? You don’t have to come in or engage, just...well it could be a while, maybe we could just meet up later.”[/color] Rick gave an incredulous look. [color=AF7AC5]“My work physician mentioned it off hand and I haven’t been...able to stop thinking about it. I guess a near death experience can do that.”[/color] He swung his arms casually, palm meeting hand and bouncing back.

[color=3b9bcd]“Do you do everything your ‘work physician’ says?”[/color]

Bruce shrugged. [color=AF7AC5]“I never have before, really.”[/color] Rick continued to stare, his irritation fading away back into nothing. He gave a noncommittal shrug to the man several years his senior.

One Uber ride later they where at some building that looked older than it really was. Rick quietly laughed at himself, joining the scientist as they stepped in with the small crowd into a fake building for the worship of some imagined god. Bruce smelled like sweat because he was still wearing the clothes he’d worked out in, which Rick quietly gave him shit for, Bruce acknowledging it with a shade of embarrassment. As they sat their estrangement was noticed, a few greeting them with smiles and small talk but nothing more. Bruce was friendly enough but Rick kept to himself. The preacher came out and went into preaching after some pleasantries. Rick zoned in and out, waiting for god to enter him but it looked like the omniscient omnipresent being was busy. There was a brief Bible reading but it was mostly a tedious list of names and dates of Adam’s descendants. The priest reminded everyone that these numbers were the basis for argument on Christian timelines contrary to what sciences physical and historical said, and that they should be looked at as a product of their times and for the meaning and ideas they espoused rather than as some cold hard truth, which Rick hadn’t thought about before.

Then he got personal, speaking about forgiveness. Rick’s heart hardened again. The sounds of a motorcycle were heard from the outside for a moment and he knew there was no room for forgiveness in his heart. Blah blah you suffer more than they inflicted upon you, blah blah live and move on blah blah. Rick damn near stood and tore out of there, but before then he felt shaking from his side. Bruce was sobbing, quietly, into his hand, his glasses off and held by his other. The sermon concluded. One of the others shuffling off briefly put a hand on Bruce’s shoulder and asked him if he was okay, to which he just said, voice watery, [color=AF7AC5]“I’ll be fine.”[/color]

Rick waited another minute or so. The priest was chatting with some of the other church goers, and other groups had formed. Rick kept feeling eyes on them. He was ready to leave but something held him here. Something kept bringing him to Bruce. Anyone else here would have said it was god’s doing, but god sure as shit didn’t tell Rick’s feet where to go. Clenching his hand over his knee, he turned to Bruce, who was almost composed, and asked, [color=3b9bcd]“Do you wanna get something to eat?”[/color][hr]The two sat across each other at the nearest Odinburger. Rick ravenously ate his pagan Fries (Freyas, whatever) while Bruce picked at a wilted salad. [color=3b9bcd]“You’re the dumbest smart guy I’ve ever met.”[/color]

Bruce gave a slight smile, finishing off his weak salad before going to get a proper Balderburger. Taking a satisfying bite, he asked, [color=AF7AC5]“What did you see when it happened?”[/color]

Rick stared until he could no longer meet eyes, instead tracing lines in the ketchup with a fry. [color=3b9bcd]“I was already half wasted, then you fucking knocked me out when you tackled me and I hit my head on the ground. I didn’t see shit and I don’t know what happened.”[/color]

Bruce put his burger down and leaned back, looking over at the staff in their sad stupid horned helmets that constantly threatened to slip off their heads as they worked. [color=AF7AC5]“Yeah, it is pretty classified. Honestly I probably passed out from fear of what I thought was supposed to happen. And...well, let’s say I saw death, and I didn’t like it. I’m trying to change a little. But I don’t really want to talk about me.”[/color]

Rick snorted. [color=3b9bcd]“Yeah, sure you don’t. You’re Christian, you just want to pretend to help others to feel good about yourself, right?”[/color]

Bruce sighed. [color=AF7AC5]“No, I’m atheist. Christ curious maybe, but I didn’t come from a place where God felt like he meant a lot. But I’m here right now, and so are you, in spite of everything.”[/color] Rick felt his breathing coming on faster. His eyelids blinked faster and faster. [color=AF7AC5]“Look, you can tell me anything you want. I won’t tell any authorities. I don’t know anything about you except your name. If we didn’t run into each other by chance, I’d have never found you and you’d have never found me, even if we tried.”[/color]

Rick cleared his throat, the french fry ground to mush as he pressed it into the paper. [color=3b9bcd]“Then why the fuck do you care? We’re just going to go our separate ways and never see each other again.”[/color]

Bruce sucked his lips in for a moment before taking a bite of his food. He swallowed and reasoned, [color=AF7AC5]“It helped me, having someone else to talk to about...things. You were in a dark place that night, but you cared too much.”[/color] Rick’s back straightened, the young man affronted. [color=AF7AC5]“If you really wanted to be gone you wouldn’t care as much how it happened and who it would affect. At least, not if you think there’s nothing after we go. So either you do think there might be something, or you care too much to go into the nothing just yet.”[/color]

[color=3b9bcd]“Is that why you took me to fucking church?”[/color]

[color=AF7AC5]“No, I genuinely wanted to go on my own. But I wanted to talk to you too. You have your whole life ahead of you!”[/color]

[color=3b9bcd]“The fuck I do! Everything’s shit, everything’s going to go to worse shit, the government doesn’t care, nothings going to get better than it is now and it was never that good in the first place.”[/color] Rick had raised his voice but the shifting of eyes had him shifting his own volume, the last words like a hiss before he stuffed a handful of fries into his mouth.

Bruce leaned in, eyes striving to meet Rick’s as elusive as they were. [color=AF7AC5]“I know, trust me, I know how bad things can be. But it’s never that bad. There’s a part of me that thinks the only way for it to get better is to burn everything down and start again. But I couldn’t live with seeing that, so I’m trying to...trying to do something that can make a difference. I know it seems like the powers that be don’t care, but I am working for them, and I [i]do[/i] care. And if it really is the best it’s ever going to be then isn’t that all the reason to live in the now?”[/color]

[color=3b9bcd]“Make a difference? I’m one fucking kid. I can’t do anything. I just eat and shit. My grades are in the toilet and my ‘parents’ are just waiting for me to hit 18 so the can kick me out, then I get to go into the Army and kill other poor people overseas for whatever corporations have the government in their pocket before they kick my ruined body to the curb too. Better to just do the job myself, or take someone important down with me. Oh cool I gave a dollar to a homeless guy bit fucking difference that makes when we live in this shithole country.”[/color]

Rick’s breathing was ragged, his face hot, his eyes wet with tears that wouldn’t fall. Bruce still looked right at him, and even through his glasses he could see tears in his eyes too. Bruce took a breath, his hands carefully folded, before saying, [color=AF7AC5]“Even it’s just one dollar to one person, it still makes a difference for that one person.”[/color]

Rick’s lip trembled. He felt the weight in his wallet, of money given to him by his foster family, with no expectation or pressure of how it was used, without him having asked or without them being obligated to. The mess he made outside of his room was always tidied up within a few days without word to him. He was here, still alive, with a roof over his head and Odinfries to eat despite, by his own words, having no one, with an ear hearing him out that had no business doing so. The castle of his rhetoric broke down, and so did he.