Dusk Confessional

[Arihant]

ooc: Thought I’d try my hand at a little self-RP – this is set a couple of hours after ‘Teasing Out The Truth’

The sunset wasn’t glorious.
In India, when the summer sun rose and set, it was spectacular. At all other times the city’s flaws were either brought hideously into focus by the blazing white sun (disease ravaging, starving claw-like hands clinging, smog hanging thickly over the horizon) or made into nightmares by the blanket of liquid dark (the pained moans of the beggars sounded like the undead to young ears; their hands never stopped clinging, never stopped reaching, scrambling frantically at legs and making little Vidya scream blue murder the only time she was ever out in the streets after dark.)
But when the sunset cracked across the sky, everyone’s eyes were brought away from the depravation that spread like a tumour underneath the opulent skin of Calcutta – no, Kolkata, it was called Kolkata in English now. Even the sufferers paused and gazed at the boiling reds that poured over the sky like a stain, fringed with violet night and silhouetting the buildings against it into a beautiful black androgyny. It could have been any city in the world.
Mohana had dreamed then. The rest of the day he devoted to his work – after all, he’d been lucky to get into that school, he had to make every second count while he was there. He had to find some way to push himself out of the caste that forced his five person family into a four-room apartment, that placed himself, his fifteen-year-old brother and his nine-year-old sister into the same twin bed, that meant sometimes his father didn’t know if he had enough money to feed his family.
At dusk, he allowed himself to think of what would happen if it the work paid off. He knew it wasn’t likely. But then again, India was changing. Everyone could see it. Castes didn’t mean as much as they had in the past. If he tried, he might be able to rise out of the cage that society had placed his family and countless others into. He could do something great; he could be someone…
The sunset was when Mohana had freed himself to dream his impossible dreams.
In Britain, the sunset was the exact opposite of what it had been in India. It didn’t have to provide an escape for anyone, in this country where the poorest people had more food than they could eat, satellite TV, phones and computers. And for the most part, it seemed as if the sunset knew it wasn’t needed; the sickly glowing orb sank behind the horizon with a minimum of fuss, usually obscured by the smoke-coloured clouds that were invariably there to shrink the sky.
But just because it wasn’t glorious didn’t mean it wasn’t beautiful.
Maybe it was just Arihant who saw it, the pale peach light that suffused the clouds and turned the usual grey monotony above the forests and cities into a landscape of its own, invisible peaks and valleys highlighted by the delicate colour. Everything and everyone became less cruel, less mercenary, less real. The light still managed to make everything seem that much more bearable, even though this country’s cracks weren’t quite as palpable as those of India.
And although both the skies and Arihant had changed from what they had been on those hot, lazy nights of years ago, the impossible dreaming still took place.
Or at least, most nights it did. Tonight was different. Tonight Arihant was too busy fixating on what he had realised he was dreaming of.
The pink tinted forest disappeared as he squeezed his eyes closed and tried to ignore the devastation that made his chest feel too small to hold his lungs. His head drooped against his chest; his hands gripped so hard on the windowsill that he sat on that he could almost hear the wood crack.
He started chanting a mantra in his head as his attempt to ignore the nagging thoughts at the back of his mind.
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think ab – about –
They were right.
Goddammit, they were right.
His eyes snapped open and he pulled his head up so fast that it hit the wall behind him. The pain was so blissfully sharp that he crashed it back twice more, hard enough that it made him feel dizzy.
But it didn’t help at all. It couldn’t stop him from thinking.
He did –
It was true, he –
He “liked” Kira.
His mind froze with an emotion that he wanted to call horror, but he couldn’t. The feeling he got when he thought of it wasn’t that chill, sickening feeling of fear or guilt, it was exhilaration. Every time he thought those words his mind blanked completely and he felt… almost happy.
Or maybe it wasn’t happiness. It was too frantic and tinged with too much desolation to call it that. But whatever it was, he didn’t like to think of it for too long. He swallowed and tried to push the feeling away from his mind, thinking of how irritatingly understated those words sounded in English. “He likes her, she likes him.” It was so sickeningly naive. It was a word for fresh-faced teenagers who giggled and talked of “liking” people as if it was the most natural thing in the world, whose lives revolved around the news of who “liked” who and whether he or she “liked” them back.
It was a word for innocents, not for Arihant. He would have to find out some other way of saying that he “liked” her. Words that could explain the full magnitude of what he had done, the full evil of his lack of self-control, the fact that his “liking” her had ruined everything.
He groaned. How on earth had he not noticed before? Now that he thought of it with this new, dizzying perspective, he could see that from day one it had been painfully obvious – or it would have been for anyone with half a brain in his head. But oh no, he’d thought it was normal. He’d thought it was normal, the way he had got lost in her wide-eyed gaze the first time he’d seen her, the way he had had to look away in seconds because of the strange warm feeling that had spread in a haze across his vision. What was it he had thought she looked like? A fairy?
Obviously that was the epitome of platonic friendship.
And God, the stupidity of it unnerved him, that he’d just thought it was because he hadn’t spoken to anyone properly in so long. He’d thought that it was normal to feel like that when he spoke to people. That must have been wilful self-deception, there, because right now Arihant couldn’t see how he had been stupid enough for to think that Kira meant the same thing to him as the rest of his friends did.
But wilful self-deceit or no wilful self-deceit, couldn’t he have started to work it out after the dance?
Would he have even gone to a dance with anyone else?
Would he have told anyone else?
Arihant had stayed at Orchid for her. At the time he hadn’t thought so, he’d thought that it was for himself alone, but he could see now that that wasn’t true. She’d given him all those tantalising arguments, all that beautiful logic that made it so easy to convince himself that he was doing it for other reasons; but now that his flimsy mask of sense had been stripped away from him he could see that he hadn’t stayed so he could get control. He hadn’t stayed because he wanted to be accepted. He hadn’t stayed because of Orchid itself, for the life that Mohana could only have dreamed of. Those reasons had all tempted to stay, but they weren’t what had made the decision.
What had made the decision were her creased forehead, her furrowed brows as she had made the argument for his remaining there – whatever unhappy emotion that was making her look and sound that was also what had made him stay. He had stayed so he could see her smile again.
And he had barely known her.
He still barely did.
No, that wasn’t true. He didn’t know all that much about her, but he knew enough. He knew just how ridiculous he had to be to make her lose her temper. He knew the flash of intuition that shone through her eyes when she worked out just how to win an argument. He knew the aversion she had to looking at his gloves for too long, so he knew never to speak of his ability. He knew that her laugh melted the niggling thoughts at the back of his mind that otherwise never went away, haunted him through every other waking moment, no matter what else he was doing…
For God’s sake, stop thinking like that. Stop it right now.
He threw his head back against the wall again.
Then it snapped to the side as the door slammed open.

[The Delaney Twins]

Sally’s messages were still shuddering gracelessly at him from all sides.
Look, you don’t have to do this. If anything, you should be apologising to Kira. Remember her? Your head? Arihant’ll be fine – even if he isn’t, you know that he won’t want to speak to you right now! Could you ever think of hammering just an ounce of empathy into your skull? For me?
He sighed and, ignoring the natural waves that still twisted into agitated springs around him, manipulated his technological waves back into a short, concise message.
Shut up, Sally. I’m taking care of it.
He pushed the door open, still ignoring his sister’s message (which had now stopped pertaining Ari and was instead listing highly inventive and equally highly derogatory terms concerning himself) and immediately jumped at the crack of splitting wood on the other side of the room.
And then he started again as he realised that his friend’s head had been the cause of the noise.
“Jesus Christ, Arihant!” he cried, walking quickly across the room. “Have you gone bloody insane?”
Brown eyes stared at him dully, and Kennedy stopped in his tracks, suddenly feeling a little ridiculous for his outburst. Of course, he didn’t let it show. “You’ll give yourself brain damage!”
The apathetic stare continued.
D*mn, he hadn’t considered this. If Arihant wouldn’t speak to him – No. It was all right. He’d just give him the message and leave, and then they could talk about it like rational adults tomorrow when he would have calmed down.
‘Course he would have. After all, it was an honest mistake, wasn’t it? Kennedy and Sally hadn’t meant to be mean to him… mostly. He couldn’t deny that it had been ever-so-slightly enjoyable at the time.
Maybe he was annoyed because Kira had been pissed off. And even that, Kennedy couldn’t really understand. He knew that it was… probably a little bit insensitive to tease Ari about liking her in front of her, but –
OK. So she was right. He was a horrible person.
But then again, he thought with self-righteous indignation rising in his chest once more, Sally and he teased Arihant all the time. If they were going to get all grumpy like this after some innocent joking, they could at least have given them some kind of prior warning. They didn’t have to go all Jekyll and Hyde on him and Sally, it was only meant to be a joke.
The silence was going to be uncomfortable if it lasted much longer.
He was just about to open his mouth and break it when Ari spoke.

[Arihant]

It was hard to focus. The thoughts that occupied his mind just wouldn’t let go. He realised that Kennedy was talking – no, shouting, it was too loud for talking – and that he had to reply to him, but somehow he couldn’t quite gather his thoughts enough to do so straight away. They still lingered on her, every memory of her passing through his frantic brain so he could analyse his behaviour and try to find evidence of his own oblivious “liking”.
And in nearly every memory he could find it.
He pushed down a despairing groan that was threatening to erupt from his lips.
“What do you want, Kennedy?” asked Arihant, trying to shake the pictures away. The words felt thick in his mouth, like he hadn’t spoken properly for weeks rather than a few hours.

[The Delaney Twins]

Wow.
So it looked like Arihant was really angry at him. More so than he had thought, and he had thought it would be pretty bad. Sally had said that, hadn’t she? She said that Ari was the sort of person who got angry about things hours after they had actually happen – that he was ‘like a little deer caught in the headlights when the bad things are actually happening, but make no mistake, you’ll be the deer if you go and talk to him now.’
She was a smart girl, his sister.
Kennedy felt himself shy away internally under the heat of the glare he received. It was something he forgot sometimes, but Arihant could be scary. He did have a temper – even if it was somewhat of a delayed reaction, most of the time.
“I, uh…” he said, feeling that their power ratio was dangerously out of balance. Usually it was him who intimidated Arihant, not the other way round. “I came up here to… Sally, she told me that we would have to apologise – although she didn’t say now, true, and it’s not that I didn’t think I should do it mysel – look, I’m sorry about what happened earlier. We got… out of line.”
Silence.
“And, um,” he continued, “We wanted to tell you that it won’t happen again. In front of anyone else, anyway. Like, ever.”
More silence.
“And I know it’s… y’know, you can be, like, angry if you want. We’ll understand. I mean, it was really, really” – Sally had said this too, hadn’t she? He should have just waited until she said it was safe and had her come up with him, he couldn’t do this on his own – “insensitive of us. Oh, yeah, and we’ll apologise to Kira too, of course.”
And even more silence.
“And I… um… Well, like I said, I’m really sorry, and… I understand if you don’t want to, y’know, talk to me, but… could you say something, Ari? Just to know you got the message, is all.”

[Arihant]

Something about Kennedy’s apology felt wrong. Arihant wasn’t used to seeing his usually overconfident friend hesitate for words like that, babble on. Of course, he had seen him like that (the first time they ever spoke sprang to mind), but since they had got to know each other it had become less and less obvious – after all, what reason would anyone who actually knew Arihant have to feel apprehensive of him?
Well, apparently more than he thought.
He sighed as the bumbling speech ended. “I’m not mad at you and Lynn,” he said.
He hoped that that would be as clear an end of the conversation to Kennedy as it was to him. He couldn’t speak to him for much longer without the thoughts that still ricocheted persistently around his mind spilling out, and he would be better off not telling anybody. He would be better off that way.
He should be.
“I’m mad at myself,” he said, turning his head away and looking back out the window, hoping that he’d get the message.

[The Delaney Twins]

Instead of being relieved that he had finally received an answer, some buried frequency in Arihant’s last words made Kennedy feel more uneasy than he could have possibly imagined. He tried to identify what aspect of Arihant’s usual wave pattern had changed, but he couldn’t. Sally would have been able to do it, but as it was, Kennedy could barely tell the difference between heat and sound waves full stop, let alone was he able to appreciate their subtle nuances and gradations. It would have been so much easier for him if Ari were a robot… but then again, that might have defeated the purpose just a tad.
Kennedy sat on his own still-unmade bed, knowing that he would have to ask Arihant what he meant but really wanting to postpone it as long as possible. He didn’t do well with all this touchy-feely “I understand how you feel stuff”; it made him want to run away more than anything else.
Eventually he managed to steel himself enough to ask, “Why?”

[Arihant]

Arihant rested his forehead against the window, hoping that the cool glass would wake him up a bit, somehow make him realise that he wasn’t – he didn’t –
But that odious “liking” was still there, and if anything, his vision blurring just made it worse. The thoughts only got louder and sharper when he removed the distraction of sight.
“Because you were right,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

[The Delaney Twins]

He immediately knew what he was talking about.
Under any other circumstances, Kennedy would have rejoiced at hearing those words. It was hard enough to get Arihant to do anything, stubborn mule as he was, let alone get him to actually concede defeat. Those three magic words – ‘you were right’, God, it felt good just thinking them – usually brought a grin to his face that more often than not resulted in the fight starting all over again as his opponent was freshly irritated by Kennedy’s smugness.
But he wasn’t used to his opponent looking or sounding like that when the words were uttered. The regular smirk refused to grace him with an appearance; instead his eyes widened and he straightened up as if an iron rod had suddenly replaced his spine. “We were?”

[Arihant]

Arihant looked over at him incredulously. “Why the shock?” he asked bitterly. “You seemed pretty d*mn sure of yourselves out there.”
If Kennedy even had an ounce of empathy in his skull he had to realise that now was not the time for jokes. It really, really wasn’t.
Or maybe Arihant was being unfair to Kennedy. Maybe it wasn’t as obvious to other people as he thought it must be, this wild emotion that had been bouncing around in his throat since the truth had first become clear to him. Maybe he shouldn’t be so harsh.
But that was considerably easier said than done.

[The Delaney Twins]

He flinched a little as he saw the first evidence of Arihant’s supposedly nonexistent anger, but composed himself quickly.
“Well, I… We were teasing. You have to sound sure of yourself when you’re teasing people.”
Arihant didn’t look impressed.
He cleared his throat, and tried grinning to lighten the atmosphere. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Ari, but Sally and I tend to do that to you kind of … well, a lot. And I know we should have… y’know, stopped and stuff, but be fair. How were we supposed to know that this would be the one subject that would get to you? I mean, usually you’re usually pretty good at putting up with us.”

[Arihant]

One side of Arihant’s mouth twitched up briefly, but a fresh onslaught of the thoughts battled it back down again.
This could be good, though, he thought, trying to raise his spirits with irrational hope. It could mean that… maybe Kira hadn’t noticed yet.
Although that was probably just wishful thinking. Why else would she have been so embarrassed when the twins had started their daft act? She was just too polite to bring it up.
“So are you saying that it isn’t as obvious as you said it is?”

[The Delaney Twins]

Kennedy hesitated and thought for a second.
Sure, it wasn’t obvious in the normal way. He wasn’t an expert on this, but he knew that usually when someone had a crush on someone else there were some pretty standard signs. The afflicted person talks about their paramour constantly, they don’t eat as much, they’re jittery, hideously nervous when the person is nearby…
Of course, most of that knowledge was gathered from sitcoms and bad fanfictions (he had too much spare time, really), so he didn’t know how accurate it was, but some of it had to be right.
And Arihant hadn’t shown it – or at least, not properly. He… well, he had never eaten much, he was always jittery and nervous. And as for talking about people, well, he’d decided earlier that that was no real indication of anything.
All the same, though…
“Yes,” he lied; giving Ari the answer he obviously wanted.
Arihant shook his head slightly, and Kennedy couldn’t work out what he was thinking. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, anyway.
But he couldn’t just stop talking. Things didn’t work that way, even though they probably both didn’t want to be having this conversation.
Maybe he should call Sally…
“How… bad is it?” he asked.

[Arihant]

Arihant looked up sharply.
He couldn’t have just asked that. He seriously couldn’t have just asked that.
But no, he looked earnest. Arihant gritted his teeth. It wasn’t one of his finer personality points, so he didn’t acknowledge it often, this occasional urge he had to try and smack a bit of sense into Kennedy via the means of a fist in the face.
“It’s pretty bad, Ken,” he snapped sarcastically. “What with the whole murdering thing and all.”

[The Delaney Twins]

Right. Well, that had obviously been excellent wording from Kennedy.
“No, I didn’t mean – ” he said quickly, and then realised that he didn’t know how to finish that sentence. He trailed off and thought for a second.
“What I meant to say was – Well. So. You like Kira.”

[Arihant]

The urge doubled in size and insistency, but Arihant still somehow managed to quell it and stay in the same position on the windowsill. “What’s your point, Kennedy?”