No Dogs Allowed

A Crow's Tail : Three Missing Endeavors

(hello, dear reader! happy belated valentine's day. these are a few stories to revisit echo and kane, just a little, in light of (the day after) this holiday. these stories were just a few brewing ideas in the back of my brain, and i thought as a thank you, i'd gift them to you all.)

A Crow's Tail

three missing endeavors.

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Post-ending. Winter. IKEA.

Somewhere in the ravine of a new year. Reference: What-If's & Fun Facts. Circa third year Echo.

"Who died and dissolved into these pale, withered walls to make this room more lifeless than Kane fucking King on his fifth Socratic seminar in the dead of the cruel, wintry, below seventy-one degrees storms that plague our poor southern souls in March?"

I looked up from my textbook. Rosalie Gossard stood in the doorway, looking over the room with such a pungent disdain I worried the paint would start peeling itself just to escape it. When her green gaze landed on me, it only seemed to worsen. 

"Are you sitting on that disgusting floor?" she asked. "That floor that hasn't been vacuumed since the eighties? Are you doing homework on that disgusting, vintage floor?"

I raised a brow. "This place was built in the late nineties, homework has no preferred setting, March is a fine month, Kane only starts to look like that by his seventh seminar, and the only thing dying or dead in here is your defective heart that's probably finally pulled the plug on its useless life support." I returned to the textbook. "Maybe you're so cold from that gaping cavity in your chest letting in the draft."

"Maybe we should have dropped you off at the nearest Salvation Army so you could be recycled into a winter coat for a suburban, short-haired Chihuahua," she replied.

I turned my back to her. "What do you want, Rosalie?"

"A reasonably-priced witch to revive whatever spirit croaked in this room." Her footsteps sounded behind me and she pushed her knee into my spine. I spun around and frowned up at her, although she looked more amused than remorseful. "Are you busy today?"

"I've got lecture at four."

"Six hours until then sounds good. Get up."

"Oh, no. Don't say it."

"No one wanted to tell you because they're all wimps, but I'll be honest with you, Yun, because you're my friend."

"Oh, God. Don't say that either."

She knelt down, and gave me a smug grin. "Your room makes psych wards need intensive therapy," she said. "Wanna go to IKEA?"

I gaped, considered her, then said, "What's IKEA?"

Diego's voice called from the ajar door, "You owe me thirty bucks!"

Rosalie groaned. She spun around and stomped for the door. "King is going with you because he lost rock, paper, scissors. Leave the molecules, you're leaving in twenty."