David

Alice settled on a pair of words he wasn't too familiar with but had heard before. “Baoying.”

The only person who spoke to him in Chinese regularly was his mother and he remembered the context, no matter how unpleasant. On Chinese New Year, it was tradition to visit the homes of friends and family, though there were precious few of the latter within reasonable distance. After David and his mother were finished with the task, David's mother drank heavily - one of the few times she had any alcohol at all, thankfully.

When his mother drank, she liked to stand at the window in the living room and consider the matter of David's father angrily. It was a less common occurrence as the years went by, and the rants had grown contemplative and sad rather than heated.

From those rants, David had encountered that phrase. His mother spoke of baoying like a promise, an inevitability.

Despite how close David was to his mother, they never spoke of what happened on Chinese New Year. David had never asked her to explain what it meant, so he would have to work it out for himself. Baoying, like most two-word phrases in Chinese, probably had a singular meaning constructed of its components.

The first of the words - bao, was used in other two word phrases that were much more common. Baochou - revenge. Baogao - a news story.

Ying was one of those troublesome words which was used in multiple parts of speech as a modifier. It meant 'should'. As in, you should be done with your homework. You should be sleeping. You should fill your free periods with classes this year.

After considering the results of his mental investigation, David was no closer to figuring it out at all. He wondered if this was how the contestants on quiz shows who didn't win felt.

Alice was clearly amused, even if she was trying to hide it by staring at his chest intently and picking at her nails.

"It's a term with religious significance," she said, when she noticed his eyes on her. "It has unclear origins, Buddhism, Daoism, possibly even Zoroastrianism, a catch-all phrase for divine retribution, usually understood as bad fortune. It's the idea of karmic debt, but in this lifetime rather than the next."

Another peal of thunder, a threat or a promise.

A sudden bout of deep, irrational gloom snuck up on David as he came to a sad realization. It started with a little seed of resentment.

David had long complained that his mother was overly precise with her language over the years, using words he didn't quite understand. He had a little more grace than to point this out to her, and as he spent more time outside of the house, it got worse.

This resentment grew deeper - into that inevitable annoyance from growing apart with a loved one.

David had always assumed that his mother indulged herself in some kind of murder fantasy one night a year given the similarities of that word, everpresent in crazed mutterings, to revenge. To him, this was a fundamental tenet of her character - a hidden fortitude, tempered with ferocity.

But that yearly rant had only ever been a prayer for some karmic justice. It made his mother seem a victim. This was a feeling he strongly disliked. It was followed by an even worse thought - maybe he'd never really understood her to begin with.

Life really was awfully unfair, wasn’t it?

David tried to stop thinking about his mother, but his ears caught on the sound of water so he thought of Mr. Watterson again, just far enough to be out of sight.

As David stood in silence, he was sure that how upset he'd gotten from seemingly nothing was bothering Alice. The look on his face must have been particularly savage because the sardonic amusement had vanished from her. But instead of pulling away from or asking him what was wrong, Alice leaned into his shoulder and spoke quietly. "Whatever you're thinking right now, you have a right to it."

Her eyes grew overcast and faraway. When she spoke again, he wasn't sure if it was for his benefit or her own.

"They're your thoughts and we might as well be clear with whatever is looking at us, or we'll regret it forever." Alice pointed at the hole in the ceiling. "It's not every day you can bring your grievances to the divine. But brace yourself."

"The divine," David mumbled, sharp and mocking. His next words came tumbling out of his mouth in a breathy rush, enlivened by her encouragement. "It can be one of two things."

His shoulders tightened in anger. Alice appeared at ease but he could feel the strain in her fingers as they dug into his back.

"Whatever it is we've decided is divine," he started, then turned to look at the Hole, "could not possibly understand fairness. It is malicious at worst and ignorant at best."

There was the rumble of thunder. He'd said it.

When nothing else happened, David took a deep breath, fully ready to continue his diatribe. After all, it had been brewing in him since the first, calamitous bolt of lightning which had killed Mr. Watterson. Maybe it had been brewing in him for his entire life.

But before he could make a sound, Alice had slid off the table to stand with him, pulling him close. It was less an embrace than something that made David think of early humans in caves, seeking defense from the cold.

Her intuition was on the mark.

The Lightning found them in a breath's worth of time, a single note of his still slow, still calm heart.

There was a different flavor to the Lightning now, a sort of disdain that felt personal. Or he'd gone crazy, because it really hurt. David bit down on his lower lip, hard enough to taste blood. It might have been his tongue.

But as quickly as it had come, it had ended.

All David had felt during this grand retribution from the heavens was a heaviness in his body, like his organs were suddenly too large to fit but that feeling left as quickly as it had arrived, forgotten in wake of the heartbeat.

The pain in his eyes had also returned momentarily but David knew it could not possibly be severe. It barely felt like a sting and, if anything, his vision sharpened.

He could feel his pulse through his fingers, quick and scared contrasted against the slow, heavy downbeats of his pulse.

He stopped short. There was something not right about that.

That low, inevitable rhythm which he could feel coursing through him could not be the beating of his heart because he could feel it in his fingertips and on his ears.

As he considered what that other, different pulse could be, David had a peculiar feeling, like he wasn't sure if he was swimming in a deep ocean or lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood. He identified it as a sense of loss - of time, of space. He wasn't sure he belonged in his own body.

A voice brought him back.

"You've heard it, haven't you?" Alice whispered, with that same excitement he'd seen when she'd begun tuning her guqin.

David realized his jaw had gone slack. He did his best to maintain his dignity by closing his mouth before trying to figure out what exactly she'd asked him. He wasn't sure why it was so difficult to understand her.

"The Song," Alice said. "You've heard the Song, haven't you?"

David didn't think he could have looked more confused if he tried.

"The Song," Alice tried again but the moment of euphoria had long gone. "Never mind," she said. She lowered her head to stare at the ground, looking younger than she was.

They stood in silence in the eye of the storm, beneath the hole in their world, with nothing but the sound of rushing water from across the library, two people marching to the beat of their own drum, the lights of the universe passing them by. Nothing but the sound of a drum that no one else could hear, that he'd mistaken for the beating of his own heart. The sense of displacement had gone and with it, the confusion.

"It's everywhere," David realized, unsure as to why he had chosen to speak but as he listened to the sound of his own voice and the sound of the drum, he grew more confident.

"It's in everything. It's not a song, not for me. It's a clock measuring something that isn’t time, a heart pumping something that isn't blood."

Alice raised her head to stare at him again, her melancholy replaced by a suspicion David didn't expect. The corners of her eyes glistened slightly, until she blinked in fury - ready to chastise him for what must have been a shallow attempt to make her feel less alone.

David tried his best to describe it, to demonstrate that what he was saying wasn't just a string of words for her emotional stability, but for his own. This was too important.

His words spilled from his lips as quickly as they came to him. "It's always been there, I'm a hundred percent sure it always has been there. It's like a memory I never had or a color I couldn't see. It doesn't want anything or need anything, it's not-" he stopped.

"It's not alive," he admitted, almost disappointed.

David frowned, then continued. "But it doesn't matter - whether it's alive or not. Because it's not me, never been, even though it has to be. It doesn't belong to me but it's mine, it's not..." David trailed off, hoping she'd understand.

"Not supposed to be anywhere, even though it's everywhere," she finished for him softly. There was a current of rapture in her eyes and the tears she'd been so ashamed of formed again at the corner of her eyes.

Her words became something more than they were. "It's real but not real like you or real like me. It's real like a story or a possibility, like an idea, like time."

A cold disdain suddenly replaced her reverence. Alice was no longer speaking to him, or at least not just to him. Her head was held high, she was looking at the Hole that had become their sky and her words fell on the downbeat of that drum only they could hear.

"It's not just a strange idea that one girl had while playing music," said Alice, "or the desperate fantasy of a boy who watched the sky turn his world into ash."

"It's more than just the divine. It's a fundamental truth worth more than whatever, whoever has cast their eyes on us. I may not yet understand what this is and I might never understand but it'll take more than this to fool me."

Alice glared at the Heavens.

There was no thunder now but the clouds did darken ominously as they thickened, from nightfall or otherwise.

The Heavens glared back.

"I'm not convinced," said Alice, in a yell or a whisper.

David discovered that he had spoken too. He had said the same words, in that same moment of time.

Whatever feeling that David had been trying to explain in words, that Alice had named the Song, quickened and changed, for the first time since he'd heard it, into a frantic drumbeat.

David knew that they had said something important.

Perhaps it was from the way her hands shook on his shoulders, or from the way the doubts he didn't know he had settled in him, or from the ever darkening clouds - whatever those words were, could not and would not be taken back. They were a promise that had to be kept, a knot which could not be uncut.

Maybe they were only important words that he'd ever said.

The fourth bolt of Lightning with his name, with her name, fell from the Heavens, through the Hole in the World.

This time, it was different.

It was not the heat and the light of the fury from the storm, nature bent to some unknown will. This bolt of lightning did not think, it did not design, it was not alive. It had fallen from beyond the sky, beyond those hands which had already called down the lightning three times in this dawn.

This lightning came from somewhere else, somewhere as important as those words they had spoken together.

Alice had already given herself to unconsciousness, closing her senses to anything which was not her Song, slumping forward into him with that small smile.

But David couldn't shake the feeling that there was something about the lightning, that there was a reason this bolt of lightning was here.

David wasn't sure if he'd spent seconds or an eternity trying to draw meaning from the lightning as though it were a language he'd not yet learned to speak.

And he'd come away with a singular intuition, an odd feeling he couldn't quite grasp fully. But he was sure it wasn't a flash of imagination, as he closed his eyes and forgot the words as quickly as he'd learned them.

It was too fitting, too symmetrical, too tragic. This was his birth in a language too wonderous to exist, too complex to parrot, too revolutionary to remember. They were his first words - a cry for his mother.

And she responded.

He heard, in her voice, one of the poems she was so fond of reciting while she cooked and cleaned. Wholeheartedly does a mother sew, for the fear that her son would roam and roam.

It was garishly selfish of him that this would be his strongest memory of her - that it would be about him.

And now, David could be sure that the Heavens had taken insult to those words he and Alice had uttered together. And he was sure that it would be his mother who would bear the weight of his insolence. She was never going to see him again.

He could only wonder who would pay the cost for Alice.

David's eyes closed and he let the sound of the Song define him.