With Love, From Me

CHAPTER THREE

"Arian!" I opened my eyes to see a bright above me as I came back into consciousness, "Hey man you awake there?"

I exhaled and closed my eyes as I realized who has woken me up and let my head loll to the right to face my doom.

"Haha! You scared me buddy!" I just stared at him, "what are you doing out here so late at night?"

Jerry, a student in three of my classes, was standing next to me with a slack jawed expression of astonishment on his face.

"What are you talking about Jerry?" I asked him and blinked out the grogginess from my eyes.

"Dude, it's three in the morning!" he said with a 'well duh' look on his face.

I realized that the bright light above me was not the sun but the glare from the streetlight outside my apartment.

"Shit," I said closing my eyes again as I rested the back of my neck on the bench I had been sleeping on.

"So?" he pushed," why are you out here in the middle of the night?"

I mentally prepared myself to explain the obvious to him.

"Technically Jerry, it's the early hours of the morning, and I simply fell asleep a few hours ago. I could however ask the same to you though," I said, and sat up looking at him like a dog begging for food, only I was just begging to get an answer.

"BUSTED!!" a loud voice came from across the road. Jack, the fair haired pretty-boy bundle of sarcasm and mischief was shouting and practically howling all the down to the other end of the street.

"I-umm..." Jerry seemed at a loss for words, "you know what man, I gotta go."

He took off down the sidewalk with a frantic, hurried gait.

"Hey when we gonna eat Aiden?" Jack, and many others called me that for short.

"You're always hungry." I stated and stood up from the bench.

Jack was the kind of person that you could want to slap in the face one moment, and never want him to leave the next. I admired the way that he could have this child-like presence and make anybody smile even though he was ancient.

The appearance he has is simply a cover for whatever he looks like underneath.

Once he even tried to explain to me what it was like to see a Companion - what he is - go from the chosen image, to a more, comprehendible form.

He said it was like watching colors on a canvas melt down and reveal the blank nothing beneath, only the colors were his skin, hair, and everything else the naked eye can see down to something that resembled a more life-like mannequin.

Normally something of that nature would be the jet fuel of a child's nightmare, but I seemed to find it comforting. The thought that we all have another form outside of the bodies that we call ours is somehow just something to rely upon while we live out the years we have left here.

They were like us once.

The companions were here just like me, living out their different lives until the cycle ended. Nine lives to determine if you would fight in a never ending war in the real world, or if you were deemed worthy to choose a soul and accompany them through the last three lives since those are when, one could say, shit goes down.