Ready or Not

Author's Note: Ambiguous plot where I just wanted Norman and Ray have a talk after everything that has happened with the genocide and the trio making up and living in the Human World.

Manga spoilers for Chapter 153.

Sometimes, he doesn't know how he and Ray became friends, if they even were, or if it was all a ruse, something to make up for their own deficiencies, to distract themselves from their bottomless boredom.

In the darker days, he almost believes this. He wonders if Ray does too, wonders if he should hope that Ray does, and if Ray should, even if only for Ray's own benefit.

When all is said and done, it's not easy to piece together. Why does anyone smile at anyone? Stay with anyone? Forgive anyone? Why is Ray here now, buttering bread in his kitchen like nothing – like the past few years – never happened?

Norman still hasn't been able to formulate the right words, for Ray, for Emma, for anyone really. He woke up one day and everything was a little muted, a little dulled. There are days where he almost forgets his own voice, does not know where it comes from, does not know where it should go. There are days where he wouldn't know how to put one foot in front of another if it weren't for Emma's hand at his back. And here, Norman thinks he could and probably would forget to eat if it weren't for Ray humming a faraway tune as the egg sizzles on the frying pan and is then set before him, just as, some additional inches away, Ray is set before him.

He wants to ask about Emma, wants to ask: Why are you here? Why aren't you with her? She's your girlfriend, isn't she? But the last time he'd half-attempted that, he'd gotten a placid smile and a 'Yeah' and a 'So?' and it had gotten neither of them anywhere really.

So he settles for poking a fork at the egg, watches the yolk pour out and pool in his plate and something about the burst of yellow makes him lose the appetite he didn't really have to begin with. He wants to push the plate away but doesn't have the heart to. Ray must read this because instead of sighing or saying something admonishing about wasting food, in an effortless motion, he scoots his chair closer and takes Norman's plate, pushes a bowl of berries in front of him instead.

There's that burning, everlasting question again. He does not think that it might ever leave him.

Why?

The last time he'd half-attempted that — only half, because Ray had never let him get more than half-way without making him feel ridiculous — Ray had laughed despite all the cracks in his paint and said, 'We keep playing the same old game, huh?' And he'd never elaborated beyond that.

And Norman, picking at half a strawberry, thinks about it now.

"You used to cry all the time when we were little," Ray says, almost absentmindedly.

"I did," Norman says, not enough emphasis for it to be in agreement, not enough inflection for it to be a question. He feels like he's rehearsing something. The memory is there, surely, in the back of his head, not quiet inaccessible but harder to reach than it ought to be. There's Isabella's laughter and Emma's hand in his clammy one and the endless fear, of the dark, of the unknown, of every goddamned thing that he was certain would swallow him whole, but didn't, because Emma was there. And it had been enough, might have always been enough, until Emma wasn't.

"When we used to play hide and seek, you'd get lost, and then you'd give up and come home and you were a mess." He's half-way done tearing through Norman's abandoned egg and toast and he looks thoroughly entertained by the memory. "It was kind of precious."

Norman forces his lips into a smile because it feels like the appropriate thing to do but Ray seems to sense the wrongness in it all the same.

"In a way," Ray says, tone shifting, a little more matter-of-fact, "we kept playing, didn't we? For years and years and years, hide and seek, took turns. Soon, you grew up. Didn't cry as much."

"You got better at hiding," Norman hears himself say, without entirely meaning to, and later wishes he hadn't.

Ray grins. "I was always good. You just caught up." It should be cocky; it just sounds wistful. He shakes his head then. "You asked me why," he says, poking at a blackberry from Norman's bowl only to eye it and not do much more. "I got tired, yeah? Wanted to stop playing for the longest time but... couldn't. And now..."

"Isn't it too late?" Norman sighs, already feeling — he doesn't know — exhausted? He can't name these things so well anymore, has to probably relearn this too. For now, it's just a dull, dull ache in his chest.

"Maybe," Ray shrugs, half-hearted, "It's just — tiring now. Don't wanna hide anymore. Just want to sit still for a bit, y'know? Figured I made you cry enough when we were kids," he laughs, or tries to anyway.

"And then I caught up," Norman says, throat a little dry, which earns him an unusual moment of stunned silence from Ray.

It only lasts the briefest of moments though and soon, Ray laughs, because that's what he does when he doesn't know what else to do. He either runs or hides or laughs. Sometimes, he does more than one at the same time. This is, in some ways, a step up.

"Call it even," he says, standing from the table, pressing his knuckles to Norman's shoulder before gathering his own plates, "and uh, you really need to eat something."

Norman sits in silence and picks at the berries. They all taste about the same. It's a delayed realization that he is upset, at Ray, in this far-off intangible way, but mostly at himself. How could you ever call it even?

But all of Ray's answers feel like non-answers to him or maybe it's still too soon for them to make the right amount of sense. Truthfully, he does not know that they ever will, only knows that Ray continues to smile, continues to stay.

And as selfish as it is and as impermanent as it may be, Norman will take it over the hiding any day.