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Shiki is simplistic. Caroling birds and blossoming flowers are enough to make her eyes illuminate with romantic instances.
Sho isn’t romantic. Amorous words and phrases can never come to him with the relative ease that seems to emerge seemingly from nowhere as they do with others. His words are always exact and inaugurated, often frigid. His touch is impliable, never willing to yield to the viewpoints of others.
Yet Shiki is the exact opposite. Sweet and tender. Near docile, he wants to call her, despite how scurrilous the term may be at times. She falters at the mere mention of negativity. Always believes the sentiments are imparted onto her or derive from her own aspects.
It’s irritating.
He watches her as she glides a fallen tree branch over sand. The wind chills their small section of the beach.
“It’s cold,” she says. She’s maintaining a delicate balance on her feet as she crouches, her arm never perturbing in her writing.
He snorts. “Obviously.” He watches for a moment in contemplative silence. “I told you to factor the weather into the equation.”
Her smile is tender. She makes a sharp movement. The sand falls in coherence to her stroke, forming a curve. Almost calculative as it collapses into a perfect parabola. He inhales as her writings become apparent.
It’s the trajectory of their names. He almost mocks her for the puerility of whatever she’s attempting to do.
There’s a distant rumble. Sho turns his gaze to the heavens, estimating the timing between the inbound storm and their probability of shelter. Determines it’s a good sixty percent chance, enough to return to the car they parked nearly sixty meters away.
Shiki tosses the branch to the side. “Done,” she announces. Then begins digging in her purse. “Now let me take a picture.”
Their chances drop to fifty five percent. He watches her with thinly veiled irritation. “Impending precipitation is a nonnegotiable vector. We need to leave. Now.”
She waves her hand at him. She raises her phone, determining the perfect position to capture fleeting beauty in one frame. “I’ll be quick.”
A short laugh leaves him. As if she just divulged data wrapped in paradoxical jest. “Quick… You’re the slowest zeptogram whose intersection I’ve ever established. Zetta slow.” The clouds darken above them, and he frowns at them. Forty percent now.
And Shiki is still insistent on attaining photographic evidence of her pathetic attempt at intimacy.
“You know,” he murmurs, watching as she positions herself in a new way once again. “If the rain doesn’t terminate your fractals, the seismic sea wave will.”
“It’s only the tide.” Shiki finally rises, turning to face him. “The tide will come in and wash away the sand.”
“Then what’s the endpoint of this whole expression?” His hands gesticulate to their names written in the sand. A fleeting equation in his eyes. Momentary vector alignment of their designated monikers, designed to be displaced with the monotonic increase of the tide.
He expects Shiki to respond as she usually does, with a pout on her face and her heart on her sleeve. But instead, she only shakes her head. “It’s the temporal aspect that makes this moment special.”
Sho’s eyes narrow. “And how, when we can have permanence?” He points at the sand again. Already beginning to wane with the impending inflow.
“Permanence isn’t necessary,” Shiki insists. “This gesture was just for fun. But my reason—my love—is real.”
He shifts his gaze to the distant waves. Watches as they oscillate in the distance. They carry permanence and possibilities. Like the quantum waves that carry abstraction within their confined entities. They notify him of the position of her heart, amplify the points of her romance and desires. They inform him of the energized momentum of their relationship. A paradoxical display of aggressiveness and timorousness.
It’s a fallacy, he wants to say. But he can’t bring himself to voice it.
Instead, he observes as she returns to his side. Her arm links through his as she leans her head against him. He feigns annoyance through the tension of his muscles and words spoken purely in jest. But of course Shiki discerns his farce. Only smiles as the tide comes in and moves over their written names.
”Waste of time,” he says.
”It’s never wasted,” she responds.
His own quip is caught in his throat as something falls onto his head. His gaze shifts to the heavens, and his eyes immediately shut as drops of water begin pouring down. He curses, really just a complex term, before shaking his head.
”Optimal.” He huffs a breath as he moves the back of his hand over his eyes. “Precipitation caught us. Just as my grand equation foretold.”
Shiki’s hand reaches out. She catches translucent drops with a placid smile. And maintains it as the drizzle turns into a full storm. The water seeps along the edges of her glasses, crystalline particles beading over the lenses. If they obscure her vision, she doesn’t make it apparent. Instead, she only hums softly as her clothes darken with rain.
She steps back with a smile, and Sho almost laments when her touch retracts.
“Your name and mine in the sand,” she reiterates. Their names are muddled now. The tide is the least of their concerns as the storm brings gelidity and mistral winds.
He shakes his head. “My promises in the sand,” he corrects. That the waves will decimate, just like his own stoic vision.
His statement brings about tension. Intense, the way it always is with him. Silent promises that possess a null value. His tales of love and romance are wrapped in his mind of mathematics. Thoughts that fester with intrinsic meaning. He doesn’t deliver her roses, but instead addends systematic conveniences. New threads. An updated sewing machine. The installation of more sophisticated business programs. His words are never sweetened with platitudes he feels have been corrupted like a glitch in the matrix. He is always exact and prompt. Cold and unfeeling in the viewpoint of others. Neku always offers her a smile. Beat never hesitates to throw an arm over her shoulder.
But not Sho. He retains that distinctive personality that always places him in a set of prime numbers. Solitary, even when intersecting with other integers in close proximity.
He’s not romantic, and possibly never will be. Yet Shiki stays.
Her hands reach towards him, halting at the midpoint of their presences. “Your promises are within the confines of my heart. Not in something that isn’t stable.” When he refuses to be a tangent to her contact, she frowns. But her next words are still as propitious as ever.
“You’re the vector of my life.” The rain keeps falling. He’s inclined to drape his coat over her shoulders. Not out of consideration for her health, but out of a rare spark of curiosity. Wanting to see pink rise into her cheeks as she swoons at such a cliche gesture.
Instead, he makes a small noise of displeasure. “Follow the associative property,” he says, annoyed. As if the conversation is one that has been explicated a multitude of prior times. “The factors may change, but the result will always remain the same.”
“You are right.” She’s always haughty. It’s a side of her mind that only becomes apparent in his presence. A type of confidence that derives not from time or experience, but something emotional. Close enough to that sentiment she insists on calling love. And he wonders, briefly, if some change has been made imparted into him as well.
Shiki brings her hands closer to herself once more. “The result will always be the same. Which is that the ocean may drown our names, but my being will always remain at your side.” She smiles. Patient, wrapped in a veil of sorrow. “My origin point began when I met you.”
And Sho confirms in that moment that he has indeed changed. He can’t discern the exactness of it all, how his soul has been mapped or how his data has been rewritten. But he knows Shiki has become a significant variable in his equation. She’s amplified the components that lead him to cold results, optimizing them and instilling notions of emotional positivity. The aspect is foreign to him. It tastes like saccharine with an influx of dispensable thoughts.
But she’s real, and he’s dispirited to grate on that pathetic ambition she has for love. He takes the initiative, finally responding to her. He passes the midpoint and crosses into the presence, projecting thermal energy and the compression of bodies. She’s bold, immediate to press her palms onto his cold cheeks as she kisses him amidst water and wind and dispassion.
Drops of optimism shower onto them, in each one a world of possibilities. They cling onto their clothes, their hair, their hearts. The wind attempts to tear their embrace apart, evident in the way it bites their skin with sheer force. A rawness that borders on otherworldly.
The universe hates their relationship, she once said. It’s against their love and loyalty to each other. A selfish desire from a narcissist entity that encompasses all desires and intricate needs. It’s in love with him, she always insists. Wants him solely for itself, unwilling to share the man who can understand its sacred language with anyone else.
“I’ll rewrite the equation,” he whispers against her lips, not vocal in the thought that led to such a declaration.
Shiki’s lips part in a soft gasp. The universe ironically has given her the gift to discern his labyrinthine perspective. It has imparted onto her not rage or envy, but admiration and reverence. And he, in turn, has also developed traits catered specifically to her coordinates.
Those numbers have softened ever so slightly. Prime numbers that have been stagnated in seclusion now extend into the quadrants of cardinality. They’ve multiplied to include elements previously assumed to be nothing but extraneous variables. Companionship, kindness, tenderness.
Love.
He can graph love. It’s not an equation Sho is particularly fond of, but the coordinates of amorous kinship are ones he can calibrate. His lips meet Shiki’s once again, the way the tide meets the sand. Their names are long gone by now, but he finds himself beginning to converge on her viewpoint.
The universe may be simmering in envy at the image of its translator calculating an intimate vector with a sympathetic heart. But he has never yielded to the beliefs of others. Ethereal or otherwise mortal.
He retracts from Shiki, brushing his thumb over her cheek. “It’s always been you,” he murmurs. So soft the storm almost drowns out his voice.
But Shiki’s smile assures him, with a language all of her own, that she heard him. She embraces him again, and the storm within his mind falls into silence. The numbers fade, the equations collapse, and all that remains is her.
FIN
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