safe & sound // os & esther [day 3]

Usually, Oz hates silence. He's a lot like a Capitolite in that way – things have to whir, whoosh, and honk for Oz to care about them. Usually, silence means a dull beige classroom with dull beige papers on dull beige desks for dull beige eyes to stare at.

But nowadays, silence means safety. It means that the Bloodbath has faded away and he is still alive. It means that the monster from Four is somewhere far away from him. It means that the rhogs are dead, and his chest is stitched. It means that he's stopped falling down, and that Peter and those other kids won't kill him yet. All very practical things.

This is the first time that silence means beauty. Or, rather – its recognition. The whisper of the ferns as their broad leaves shiver against each other, their cloud-like fronds caressing his arms as he glides through them. The blue-green of the reflecting pools, how they catch the world above them and create their own little world within themselves. How a shadow can pass over the crevices in the Oasis' cave ceiling and the ceiling will turn electric blue, and the color and the light edges across everything: the pools, the trees, the light in people's eyes.

In the moment of silence, he hasn't meant to intrude on someone else's. And the silence breaks. The damp earth squelches beneath Esther's boots as she scrambles up, the click of the knife in her hand; Oz's breath catching in his throat, heart palpitating, as he jumps back and make the bushes crackle. But the silence settles again. She puts her knife away. “Oh...it's you...”

“S-sorry.” It's almost infuriating how instinctual it is to apologize. She was the one pulling a knife on him, he's just walking over here! Then again, after the welcome he gave them a few hours ago, maybe this was karma. He takes a deep breath, collects himself. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

She looks...off. Heavy. Her face even sinks a little. From fright? “Are you...okay?”

"I might scare you if I tell you the truth..." Ironically, a response as vague as this is pretty scary in itself. He forces himself to remember that Celeste liked this girl. The two of them loved each other enough that Esther flung herself at the Monster from Four to avenge her.

The girl standing before him is Good. Has to be Good.

At least, she doesn't want to hurt him. Putting the knife away had been a reassuring gesture.

"Do you think I'm okay?" she has a sweet voice. Makes him melt a little inside. Her question reminds him of Mya. When Mya's upset (and she often is), Snuff always comes around, puts his arm around her, coaxes her out of it. And Oz -- would just watch. He has no idea what to say. Dude, just be like Snuff! Easy.

"Y-yeah," the effort is audible, "you look...great..."

Oz cringes at himself. He can't help it.

"I mean, you look...kinda...sad...a little..."

But he doesn't want her to feel like those weird, shy, misfit kids that are always crying in the back of the room during history class, so he runs his mouth: "I mean, I've been sad too. Y'know with...Celeste...and everything..."

The theoretical elephant's cannon-balled right into the pond.

"She didn't deserve to die." His voice has changed. No longer the awkward boy totally failing at talking to a girl. It's deeper, tighter, darker -- edging towards a man's.

But what was he doing! Trying to make her cry? He always made these situations worse. "Sorry! I..." He's on the cusp of giving up. "Should I just leave?"

Oz has turned to go when she calls him back. He peers at her, surprised. But Esther is proving full of surprises. Letting him stay with her and her friends, how honest she was with her emotions, how that honesty can be totally shocking one moment ("I am always sad...") to totally relatable the next ("I'm just not very good at people...").

Her cute little laugh is also a welcome, blush-inducing surprise, but immediately he tries to push that out his head.

"Yeah, I suck at people too," he laughs sheepishly, edging closer to her. "I, uh, I used to piss off my friends a lot at home..."

Crap, he was over-sharing again. Dude, bro, just stop talking!

He follows her gaze out to the pond, thinking about what she said earlier. About being sad and empty all the time. It sounds like such a terrible thing -- yet now he realizes he understands what she means. It's so easy to be sad and empty. He wouldn't say that he feels that way all the time, but...

The knife on the floor, the hand reaching towards it

...he gets it.

It's so hard to find people who get it. Mya and Snuff never did. That was why he pissed them off, that night before the reaping. They thought when he said, "You'll die anyway," he was throwing them away. He wasn't. In his peevish, awful, spiteful way, he was trying to get them to come to him. So he could empty them out -- or maybe so they'd fill his own emptiness. It was impossible to be sure.

He notices Esther's reflection in the water. Her reaping was similar to his. Neither of them volun-told, unlike most of the other reaped children. Why? What did she have to lose, gain?

...Did the emptiness have anything to do with it?

He's scared to ask, yet he finds himself opening his mouth to ask anyway. But then he notices something, his eyes go wide--

There's light hanging over the water.