A/N: Okay. Hi.
I'm sorry; this is really something odd. I don't even know- it was mostly a product of spontaneous writing. It's quasi-devoted to 'Flowers for Algernon', to 'Up in the Air', to every backpacker and world-hopper you may or may not know, and… to those people who hop on planes a lot but don't really get to see the world. Enjoy.

Warnings: Inexplicit sex, some swearing scattered here and there, schizoids, and, uh... pessimism?

There are certain realities that you come to accept, sooner or later, in the vague continuity of your life.

I, for one miserable soul, catalogued my determinant facts at the scrawny, zealously-dieted age of eleven: I am a genius, the sky is my home, I can be likened to an animal kept behind bars to be observed by millions beyond, and if I were only let out the world would be my sandbox.

Things seemed to grow easier once I'd organised and figured out my reality, but perhaps that's fundamental human psychology. Once you've figured something out, you've lulled yourself into a sense of security and you feel okay with whatever comes your way, because you've duped yourself that you understand it and you have it under control.

You'd be surprised how many people live this way. Ten years ago I attended my very first neuro-psychological science fair, not as a child of an academic or even as an attendant myself, but as a display subject to be awed and spat statistics about. I was initially complacent about this, because I had been told about it as much as four years preceding the event, and more or less I was eager to meet great brains like my own. Perhaps brains that were riddled and skewed with the weight of age, but they held knowledge like an iron grip on diamond spanners, did they not? After years upon years of bursting barely comprehensible, elaborate discourses on geothermal energy's relations to ancient plate tectonics and how we could optimise the Radiant Garden's gross energy output with certain calculated draws of energy from measured areas and getting naught of reaction but the scratches of heads and sheepish redirection, I was eager to meet the true giants and share my thoughts.

Ultimately, it was not my knowledge but my brain alone that was put on display. I was shrunken into a monkey behind bars, tranquillised and shut up and strung along with verbal puppet strings to talk something scientific and technical-sounding only when I was directed to. And the gods of the mind turned out to be all the same bumbling fools. I was disillusioned again and again, and one year later forced to organise my reality in accordance to the pathetic world of academics. Once-idols became ants at my feet.

I'm not saying I was literally treated like a monkey or seriously tranquillised. Actually, I was treated quite well, and given plenty of freedom in all my time to visit all these science fairs. Few pubescents have as much freedom as I did, for I could seriously go anywhere I wished should I only allow Lexaeus or some other generous and preferably well-built apprentice to accompany me. But I didn't ask for much and I hardly went anywhere. The ever-changing home of hotel rooms became my sanctuary as soon as I convinced myself that it was a home.

I am twenty years of age, fairly good-looking in an almost synthetic, laboratory-quality way, and my sole comforts come in the strikingly simple form of books, science, sex, and French table wine. Sometimes together, but I can mix and match.

My friends are not friends at all, more like pieces of intelligent furniture with legs that trail after me on every flight I take, but in that ungainly way I have moulded some sort of respect for my fellow apprentices. There are many women, and some men, if only because there's a dismissive screw-'em-all mentality that seems to overtake my seatmates in the first-class flights whenever they can capture someone who can converse fluently and intelligently enough, but most of the time there is Lexaeus. All other people fade into an indistinct blur of faces, shudders, and moans in my memory. But I'm sure Lexaeus appreciates the time he can spend in my bed when he should really be standing vigilant at my hotel door.

It's a yawning October a few miles above France, and I have a paperback with a cracked, fatigued spine in hand and Lexaeus at my side. Dusk is breaking on the indistinct horizon, and if I pressed my hand to the window I may feel a slight, airy chill, but I stopped window-watching France after the fifth flight. The details tend to change over time, but it takes major projects to change the huge picture of the hill-strewn, green landscape. The Beast's Castle is a five-minute marker for the flight, the coast is another after another thirty minutes, and there are tiny markers like dotty aqueducts and churches along the way, but otherwise nothing changes.

We pass through the clouds, and Lexaeus has stolidly not even moved. The man is practically bursting beneath his seatbelt, but he is stolid enough to move very little even through the tiny throws of in-flight turbulence. The only sound that I can hear is the faint hum of my ears adjusting, Xigbar cracking some jokes about Xaldin's drunk flying two seats away, and Vexen quietly grumbling about first-class service. Apparently he wanted the vegetarian dinner.

As we emerge from the clouds, I give up on my paperback and sigh, setting my pencil between the pages and gingerly shutting the copy. Seemingly just feet beneath us, white clouds stretch out like raw, freshly-picked cotton. The sky is a gradient of orange and purple, the only indication that there is even time in this alien void of a space above the world.

"Could you get us some wine?" I ask Lexaeus, knowing he wants his nerves calmed as much as I do. My mind has recorded us going into the air over seven hundred times, circumnavigating the world over and over with tedious frequency, but never once has Lexaeus enjoyed it. He is a man literally planted to the earth, and every moment he is detached from it I feel like I'm looking at the naked underside of a rock that should not have been displaced.

He stiffly complies, catching the sprightly stewardess as soon as she comes by, and ordering our regulars. Yuna knows exactly what these are. She is the one who makes faint jokes about how the legality of my drinking changes from country to country, after all. I'm pretty sure she'll continue joking even after I become internationally legal.

I recline in my seat, feeling it encompass my form with plush, modest-smelling fabric in a way that Lexaeus's huge figure could never enjoy, and take a deep breath of the pressured plane air. Somewhere in the world, it is deep into night time, even as daylight continually fades outside my window. I try to imagine that place, lose myself in its faint details, and not quite fall asleep before my wine arrives.

It may very well be my last flight. I pray so.

()(())()

"And now, we are proud to announce the pride of the University of Ansem the Wise, the genius mind, the model child of all children who fell under King Ansem's generous wing, Zexion Ishida!"

There's no velvet curtain and no ring of fire or lavishly-decorated donkeys, but as the applause begins to rain I vaguely feel like an animal in the circus.

Xemnas takes on a completely different persona when he sits behind the microphone; seated at the helm of the stage, he seems to obsessively be wrapping his large hands around the attention of the audience, imploring them to take attention and be awed at every syllable he exudes in that aristocratic stage drawl he has. There was a time I admired him and likened him to an idol worshipped by savagely revering masses, an endlessly wise avatar to the glorious presence of Ansem himself, but again I was disillusioned over a decade ago and Xemnas was added to the long gallery of disappointments.

But he has always been my representative. He has always been the puppet master, the one among us most well-versed with coordinating and leaping into action, and he can surely be called our leader.

"Young Mister Ishida has, even in fresh childhood, excelled at all intellectual pursuits. At his tender age of twenty, he has already written several highly enlightened discourses on varying topics, from social economics to geothermal energy, which has contributed greatly to our small nation of Radiant Garden. We owe his excellent education to the academic programme we attempted in the university, which created a clear, chemical connection between the emotional and intellectual components of the mind in a non-detrimental manner, greatly advancing his learning capabilities..."

This is Xemnas's ingenious way of saying that there was no physically painful side-effect to the experiment they'd carried out on a gifted eight-year-old orphan. I knew myself that I was emotionally stunted in capricious, difficult ways that were beyond me or any therapist, but it's Xemnas's job to hide that behind lavish verbal diamonds and awe the audience with my achievements instead. We all just hope that no one musters the brains to ask why this experiment has not been conducted on everyone else.

The answer is this: We can't have a prosperous nation full of schizoids running free, can we?

But what irks me is not Xemnas's showy drawl, or even the audience's eyes as they objectify me into a successful experiment product, but the way that Xemnas makes it sound like I've been a product of a disbalance of neurochemicals from the very beginning. Like I was scum, but then he and Ansem and the other apprentices came and plucked me from the gutters and made me into a perfect zoo display.

And it has been here that the thoughts of escape have began to hatch in my mind, cracking out of the shell just behind my blank smile.

()(())()

I'm not sure if I've been in the Emperor's Hotel before, but the cardkey lock clicks open with an almost familiar beep when I run my room card through it.

"See, we did get the number right after all," I speak unnecessarily in short of a breath as I glance Lexaeus's way, faintly thanking him as he rolls my luggage towards me. It digs into the deep red carpet, but I pull it along calmly into my room. This entire hotel can be summarised in its thick, regal red carpet, which smells subtly of cleaning agents and mildew, and its beige walls decorated with cheap bootlegs of oriental prints. It is forty floors tall and I am at the top, but no height, no ceiling-to-floor windows or plush beds can conceal the fact that it sits in the heart of a pirate night market street.

The Land of Dragons is a diverse one, after all.

"Xie xie ni, stolid Lexaeus," I half-joke as Lexaeus removes his sturdy, beaten rucksack from his own back and sets it atop the shoerack just beyond the front door, taking some dozen books from it and setting the pile on the desk. It's a private joke that's echoed between us ever since the first time I visited this nation. I had smooth-talked and charmed with the locals to make my group's way through the airport, through the taxi ride, into a hotel, and to the convention we were supposed to attend.

When he closes the door, it is a sound dampered by the thick carpet. My entire hotel room feels just like that: dampered. Even the light generously streaming in through the window has an artificial, dimmed-and-screened feeling to it. The air-conditioning does its best to conceal the humid tropical air of the country I know I'm in, instead turning the temperature down twenty degrees. The tile in the bathroom is freezing to the touch and all. I find the atmosphere pleasant in a dumb, shallow way.

"They expect you to make a speech at the convention in the Pridelands next week," Lexaeus notes concisely as he watches me take a seat directly in front of the window.

"I know," I say, not looking at him, but at the view of the city that stretches out before me- it tapers out into small towns and divisions as I trace the inter-city public train route. "But that is another week." Most of our communications were non-verbal exchanges, muses that we shared in the space of silence left by seeds planted by the few words we had traded. We both know what I meant: We have an entire one-hundred and fifty hours to enjoy local cuisine, get food poisoning, hook up, break up, brush up on our patois and, really, do nothing. We aren't tourists here, just foreigners. Like businessmen; we're planted in a country for one specific reason, and lose purpose when that specific reason was fulfilled.

It's all so mundane that I'm tempted to rise from the chair and urge Lexaeus into the huge, pristine double bed, but we haven't got at it in months. Something in Lexaeus has been fatigued, jaded after our long years together, and while I don't push him, I sense it.

"Do you want to quit?" I ask him after a moment. I almost want to say 'retire', because I've known Lexaeus has been in his business for so long that it feels like he's almost in a mid-life crisis, but he's actually a young man in relative terms. It'd be very easy for him to quit- sign a paper, fold it into an envelope and take the next flight to the Radiant Gardens to give it to Ansem. The foundations of his life aren't ensnared in a world of flight, blank smiles and convention displays.

Lexaeus doesn't respond to my question. Instead, he opens the doors and leaves the room. I know he is standing just outside, perpetually guarding me, and probably contemplating that exact question.

At seven-thirty, I leave the room in a change of clothes to go to the basement floor for dinner. Lexaeus is not in sight.

Sitting amongst the sound of thin wineglasses clinking and waitresses silently manoeuvring orders and dishes in dim, ambient lighting, I feel almost comfortable in this sort of solace. I could join Lexaeus and the other apprentices for dinner in the penthouse, but instead I've opted to sneak out of their vigilance and appreciate this solitary freedom. Somehow, with forty floors of separation between us and with a completely different crowd surrounding us, I feel liberated from their air. It's probably just a fleeting sensation, but I want to hold on to it.

Up in the penthouse, there are men who sit at the very pinnacle of society's silent hierarchy: politicians, famed academics, models and actors. But in a basement cafe, the crowd degenerates into a splattering spectrum that is so varying that there's a sense of light anonymity to everyone. Here, I can see how people shed big names and burdens and just accept and absorb the fact that nobody knows anybody.

Two tables beyond my own marble-topped table, a man in high religious robes is immersed in a thick, gold-paged copy of what may or may not be the Bible. Just the next table over a girl with flaming red hair speaks very little but communicates with enthusiastic body language to a dark-haired businessman. Two young businessmen, who could well be wealthy C.E.O.s, sit together silently at a table, one with long, silvery wisps for hair and the other with barely-tamed gold locks.

The waitress arrives with my rice-wine. As I sip it and absorb its comforting warmth, I feel completely isolated from the apprentices, from science, and from Ansem. I can't call it a bad sensation.

My comforting environment is broken, however, by a loudened grunting through the P.A. system. I hastily set down my tiny cup of wine, craning my head towards the supposedly desolate stage.

That's when I see him.

A lanky foreign boy (so strikingly, blazingly foreign that I wonder over and over again, 'What is he doing there?') taps the microphone, drawing the attention of all idle eyes in the cafe. He grins- a goofy, brilliant grin that looks like, somewhere in the world, a million lights have flicked on- and clears his throat again. "Hey, all, good evening. How are you all this evening in the easygoing bustle of the Emperor's Cafe?" he speaks through the microphone, voice amplified, but absorbed so completely by the walls that I feel like I can barely grasp it. Nervously he plays with his badly-kept, but somehow (probably in his view) stylish half-mullet of a hairstyle. "I'm Demyx, here for your entertainment. I'm going to start off tonight with a little something. This is 'Tell Me'. I learned the instrumental parts of this from a man I met in my travels in India."

He surprises me when he pulls out an object that had been hidden behind his stool- an elaborately-decorated blue sitar. He begins his performance.

He begins with a slow, minimalistic and trance-like sitar instrumental. The notes have a foreign, touching and soulful air to them, and no doubt he has some semblance of skill. He opens his mouth. I brace myself for terror, but instead find myself captivated as soon as his singing voice meets my ears. I'm shocked.

This young man, Demyx, is not singing, speaking, not even reciting, I'm sure of it.

He is seducing. He's seducing my ears, the air... the very nature of sound. In that bare, almost base performance, he plays like the flow of water down naked rocks: naturally, beautifully. And in the way he sings that is almost erotic, but resounding with skill every second- I gulp down my rice-wine and wish I could turn the whole world on mute, except for the sound of that.

()(())()

Demyx has to end his performance at some point, but when I realise that he is gone from the stage for the night it's also when I realise that I have hardly touched my dinner, it's nearing midnight, and it's cold. The crowd had changed out into a world of owl-eyed individuals, mostly alone, nursing drinks, and all with respective reasons to be in a basement cafe a quarter-hour before the date changes.

My breath hitches when a olive-skinned hand crawls over the frame of the chair across from me, and my eyes travel upwards to face the man that I'd been fixated on for the last two hours. "May I?" he asks me, smiling in a friendly manner, even as he drops into the chair without even waiting for my assent. He moves like it's completely in his nature, like nothing is calculated, contemplated, and everything is boundless. I pry my gaze off him when he orders a mock-tail, and finally begin to partake in my cold rice.

"The sitar is a rare instrument," I barely scrape out the words after five minutes of anxious silence, "I doubt that a brief instrumental background is all you learned of it in India. Where else could you learn how to play like that?"

When I look up to see his face, I can tell he's surprised at my conjectures. When his order arrives in the form of a tall, colourful glass, he barely even notices it. And then he laughs. "Wow. Guess I'm sharing tables with a guy who speaks English after all," he says, and yet there's no hostility, only completely openness in his words and body language. "You're right. I got stranded there a few years back, and basically had to learn how to play to save my own hide."

I give him an incredulous look, partially against my own will. "Stranded?"

"Stranded," he confirms freely. "I was backpacking with Axel, but he hooked up with another backpacker. A guy and his brother, both fresh out of high-school, and bound for the Land of Dragons the next day."

A backpacker. I'm not surprised, because it does explain what he's doing in this corner of the world, working, and not looking particularly wealthy. "What a free lifestyle," I comment. At this point, the cursory facts about us are obvious: we contradict each other. Even in our speech, there is so much different that it's almost embarrassing. But somehow we continue to carry the conversation, like we are both curiously exploring a territory we hardly ever looked at before.

"Yeah, it's okay. I mostly hit the road because I wanted to see things I'd never seen before, but then," he gestures a wide clap with his hands, vibrantly, "bam! It went beyond seeing. Backpacking's not just sight, because damn, if it was about that, I may have as well seen a photo album in five minutes and been done with it. Nope. It's feeling. A lot of feeling. Hearing, smelling, feeling... And getting everything that goes around in these corners." Then, blushing sheepishly like he's just caught himself off-track, he continues, "I'm, uh, Demyx."

I decide not to tell him that I've been here for the last two hours, watching him, and his name is already a familiar note in my mind. "Zexion," I say, before taking in another mouth-full of rice and swallowing quickly. "How long have you been away from home, Demyx?" To be honest, I don't particularly want to know the entire story of his backpacking life, but it simply puzzles me that a man can live a life like he does: slowly absorbing the world one budget hotel at a time. It doesn't occur to me that such a thing exists very often, and my perception of a world of vagrants as unbounded as his is a fantastic concept of a life.

Demyx laughs again, and something flashes in his aquamarine eyes. It's a look that seems to know that I am naive to his reality, but he somehow never grows patronising or annoyed at me. "Home is the world, Zexion. Gypsies like me just walk from one part of the home to another like we're slowly transitioning from one room to another. I've lived this way since I graduated from high school, so, uh, that'd be..." he seems to count on his fingers, "seven years. Made sure to finish early and all that. I mean, I still read, so I'm not a complete simpleton, but..." He pauses. "I get the feeling you know a whole lot more than me."

"I know nothing," I whisper, smirking, and take a sip of water.

He seems both amused and bemused by this. Snorting, he says, "Yeah, play that game, will you?" before mirroring my motion and taking a gulp of his own drink. He seems to be willing to carry more conversation with me, even despite an edge of slight annoyance at my attitude, and somehow time fades into indistinct lines between us. I learn about him, about his vagrancy on a yacht for the last two years, before he stopped attending the charter the captain was holding and instead took the next bus to the capital city of the Land of Dragons. His frequent explorations of the corners of the city, bourgeois, impoverished and high-class alike. His thoughts. Demyx is not religious, but seems to convert what could be his faith into a love for people, for music, and for life. It's easy to come to observe the way he talks about the world like it is a perpetual beauty, but I find it increasingly difficult to actually see the world in all the myriad of colours he paints it with.

And when he's stopped talking, there's an awkward quiet that finally washes over us like a tide that has been waiting all that time, and I realise that he wants to know about me.

And I realise that I have very little to say.

My mouth goes dry, and my cup of water has taken the opportune moment to be empty, and I feel upset for some reason.

But Demyx smiles, seems to read my mind, and leans in over the table, whispering to me and only me, "It's okay. Each to his own, if you don't want to talk about yourself." Or at least that is what he seems to say, because I can't check or think about it, because in the next moment he is kissing me.

()(())()

We're backstage. It's the only place that we can seem to think of going to now that my dinner bill is paid and we're starting to become passionate. Sitting across from each other on a table is just too much to bear now, especially after Demyx's kiss, and as soon as we shut the door behind ourselves, Demyx is gently coercing my body into more and more fluid willingness to intertwine with his. It is a slow and warm embrace that we seem to wrap in, only our lips are inseparable. My mind is shut off, partially in grogginess from my jet-lag setting in, but partially with intoxication with rice-wine, bad food, and the husky sound of Demyx's voice whispering in my ear every moment when we're not kissing.

We crumple to the floor, somehow agreeing that neither of us can stand anymore.

I can't say now that we made love, but I could never describe what happened as having sex, either. It was something that fell in a strange niche between. It was not friendly, not animalistic, nor loving- more than anything, it felt like a pretence for something else completely. I couldn't figure it out, and even as I shuddered and eased into his trailing touch, feeling my mind reduced to an hot, ecstatic muddle and my body urgently craving his fingers more and more, I wondered what the hell this was. Demyx was no virgin, for certain, with the way he handled me, skilfully melding against my body as we both moved against and about each other and the thick carpet.

We kiss again, and in our own mess of cloths and sex, silent and incriminating in the darkness lying beyond red velvet curtains, we lie.

Somewhere, a clock strikes two in the morning, but we can't seem to pick ourselves off the floor.

My clothes are rumpled, but thankfully mostly clean, and when I don them again it's with a haphazard sort of knowledge of what has transpired. It lurks in the air and in my mind. hauntingly, seemingly unwilling to be dismissed as just a sexual encounter with the late-night musician of the Emperor's Cafe. Demyx smiled, understood that I had somewhere to be other than catching sleep on the floor of the backstage of the cafe, and kissed me again before we departed. I don't think I'll ever see him again, but I shouldn't bet on it. One hundred and twenty-six blank hours left in the Land of Dragons leaves a lot open as soon as you dismiss all the work I will be doing in the privacy of my room.

I enter my suite as quietly as the beeping cardkey lock will allow me, and shut the door behind me with contrived care. Lexaeus is still absent, but it is too late for me to even be concerned. Beyond the city lights sparkling over the horizon like jewels, the faint traces of a sunrise seem to taunt me. There was time to waste and no urgency, so I crawl beneath the heavy covers dressed as I am and shut my eyes, groggy and lulled into a sense of airy security by my own sleepiness.

()(())()

"So. You know all of my dirty little secrets-" I'm surprised to hear he has so little- "but I know nothing about you. Sure, I know you like to say 'I know nothing', I know you need glasses for everything except sex, I know you're not a talker, but." Demyx stops here, whirls around and looks at me like a maniac out of breath. "You gotta start talking about yourself sometime, you know." Here he re-wraps his grip around my hand, knowing full well that in this world we've emerged into, he is the local and I am the alien. People and wares move all about us and gutter water splashes beneath us. God have mercy on those who wear slippers in this lowly, common bootleg market, but you get get whatever you like here at the reasonable price from a vendor with a missing tooth and an eye for hagglers.

"I can't talk to you in this crowd," I return reasonably, feeling my larynx grate from shouting more than I'm used to to be heard. People fall silent when I talk; it's a rule. But nobody knows my story in a constant flux of the mid-lower class moving through a bustling market that only sets itself up when the cloak of night securely falls over the city. The city world seems to feel safe to drop its façade at night time, and let all the true inhibitions of society fall out like a throng of entrails and drag neon and voices through the air.

Demyx seems to think what I've said is sensible, and he smirks like I've been one-upping him constantly. The truth is that there's no competition here between us, just bewilderment and communication lost in translation. I can hardly even understand what I'm doing here; one moment I'm hunched over my research, organising index cards in obedient lines, occasionally risking glances at the glittering light pollution of the city and over my pristine suite, and then I'm hungry. And then Demyx has found me and has told me, "Come on, lemme show you what real food is like here," irresistibly intertwining my fingers with his and bringing me out of the Emperor's cafe and onto the street.

I'm not afraid- this is what I tell myself. But I know that I'm not familiar with this at all.

We burst out of the night market street alive, and Demyx breaks into a run now that there is no congested crowd in the way. His multicoloured, stripes-and-checkers sneakers beat the sidewalk, and only his hand gives me enough force to keep up with him as we rush down the route, sheltered by old shophouses. He knows his way around; that much is obvious. We pass by pet stores, a fast food restaurant, groceries and clothing stores, but I have a feeling that I'm still in the most peaceful, less-developed nooks of the city.

Finally, the buildings recede and we cross out into an open street that seems to leave much space for buses, and Demyx brings me underneath a huge structure that towers above our heads and lurches over the filthy, large river metres below the grubby safety railing. It's a train stop for the public transit- I realise this belatedly as Demyx presses my back against the warm, graffiti-strewn concrete pillar and kisses me.

"Sorry," he grins breathily upon drawing away and seeing my probably surprised expression. He's much more audible now that we're somewhere dimmer and quieter; or as quiet as you can get in the heart of the city. "I just wanted to do that. Kiss someone under the train station. Have you ever seen this part of the city?"

I haven't. It's strange to admit. My only saving grace is that I know the language, fluently.

Demyx laughs. "You can speak their language, but you haven't been among the middle-class people? Man, that's like..." his thin eyebrows furrow in concentration, like he's concocting a simile as he skilfully leaps up the stairway, "that's like eating the peel of an orange and throwing the fruit away," he smiles, before looking at me directly and grabbing my arm again. I'm starting to feel like a child who can't go anywhere without Demyx's guiding pull, but I'm also preoccupied with watching the way his hair glistens in the naked fluorescent light as he drags me up the stairway to the station. "Betcha don't know all the swear words," he says.

I almost feel a blush coming, try to catch my breath and fix my glasses; we're going way too fast.

I know a few words. I learned them when I sat a few seats away from a shoe company C.E.O. making calls to his subordinate on the plane here. I'm a little tempted to use one and see how Demyx reacts, but my breath is hitched the second we arrive at the top.

We're just in a lowly public train station stilted above a filthy, wide river that runs through the heart of the city, but the view is amazing.

"Never taken public transport?" Demyx predicts as he watches my awed expression, his own gaze flickering over the wonderful example of perspective that my view paints out for me. The local rail transit is like a snake that juts out and over the entire city, winding in and out and then finally diving underground at some point, seemingly predating on the gigantic twin towers. All the way it moves in a path of darkness, the trains themselves being dots of shimmering diamonds with large advertisements painted upon them.

It's a world I don't know. One that sat beyond, and ascended above the cursory descriptions in novels and brochures. Somehow, this dirty recess in the country is something more wonderful than the portraits of waterfalls- even of the grand twin towers, sitting kilometers away from where I stand but commanding attention like sibling divas constantly under spotlights and camera flashes.

"Never," I agree at last.

My phone takes the intempestive time the ring as Demyx leads me to the counter and asks for two tickets to a place I'm not familiar with (apparently, for two adult non-students to encompass the city with a beautiful view, it only costs a puny sum). I'm annoyed as I flip it open and answer; it's a pest that's suddenly crashed into my window of wonders. It's Xaldin.

"Where are you?"

He sounds irritated and I can't really blame him. It's my second night ditching out on any apprentice-related activities- while they don't mind me isolating them to spend time on research or work, I'm certain they've checked my room and heard of my first escapade the night before from Lexaeus. "I'm out having dinner at a local restaurant. I wanted to try out their noodle soup- I heard good things about it from the bell boy."

"The bell boy?" and now Xaldin's voice is high with amusement. He likes to pretend he knows when I'm lying, when he's mostly making a good guess. He's a cunning man, but there sits two masks between us: his and mine. Things tend to get lost in translation.

"Yes," I affirm as Demyx brings me through the security gate, using our two passenger cards to get the automatic gates to open for us. It feels like cards run everything in this country. Above our heads a train seems to rattle in with an ominous rumble, and Xaldin probably hears it too, but the people around us still sound like a society engaged vaguely in eating. "The bell boy all but kicked me out of my room a while back. He said that there were a few experts called in to investigate a vermin problem. Apparently someone brought a few in when they brought in a hooker. Amusing story. You can verify this with the hotel- just tell them the bellboy's name was Marluxia."

Of course, I'm lying. Marluxia is Vexen's boyfriend, a hairstylist in France, but Xaldin doesn't know that.

I hang up before he can spout even an inkling of a doubt about my claim, and then I turn off my phone. I board a train with doors that open and close automatically, Demyx guiding me the entire way.

The entire train is composed of four cars, with no separation, dull grey seats and rows of poles and handles to hold on to. The fluorescent lights line them again, and they look like something you could interrogate a Mafia lord beneath. There are only a few people- two open seats readily available on every aisle of them, lining the sides, but Demyx and I opt to stand up, even as inertia throws us a little. Or at least I want to stand up, because the view- the view. In a second, buildings and signs, light and dark, whir past me in a barely distinguishable blur.

I'm sigh and try to compose myself a little. This is probably nothing to Demyx.

He squeezes my hand, his hoodie sleeve oversized, worn-down and comforting between us. I realise we've been holding on to each other all this time.

()(())()

"Thank you," I say at last, as we're walking off the train and walking through the crowd, feeling frigid air-conditioning gust down upon us as we ascend the stairs. Demyx smiles beside me.

"I haven't even taken you to the restaurant yet."

When we emerge from the underground, I take notice of the change in our setting. It's as if my world has been upgraded to a world of robots and glass and floors so white and clean that you can see the faint form of yourself in them. It feels like a world I know a little better. "Sorry I'm taking you all this way, but that restaurant is the only place I know that serves really good food that won't get you food poisoning or anything. Local bacteria," Demyx explains apologetically as he promptly lets the exiting gates eat up our transport cards and watches them as they open up before us.

"Local," I echo faintly. I don't quite feel like I'm really in touch.

He nods, walking fast ahead. His back is a form that I'm getting used to seeing: tight plain v-neck shirt marks every arch and straight line that makes his upper body, loose jeans calling my attention faintly, his frayed hoodie now comfortably wrapping around his waist and distorting the mental picture I am painting of his physique. He's not muscular, but muscle and flesh and bones still seems to be the only things that compose his constitution. I've already learned all this yesterday night when he and I had sex, I tell myself as I watch him bob up in down in that peppy gait of his, but it's hard to register. He's still a stranger I want to know better.

He turns around and breaks my reverie. "D'you want me to play a guessing game about you? Because I lose those. All the time." I can't tell if he's joking.

So I shrug. "Do you want to?"

Demyx looks uncomfortable about learning about me this way. "Uh, we could play twenty questions. Or a detective game where I'm supposed to deduce stuff about you by the little things, like how you walk and what you wear. Or, you know, like the way most mortals communicate: Conversation?" he grins. He looks like a cautious tyke skater unsure if he's playing on thin ice.

We walk out into more streetlit sidewalks. Traffic is more fluid around us, and everything feels more like the hems of the skirt of a high-class shopping mall. "Do you like it here?" I ask him instead.

He looks a little annoyed that I'm escaping him again, but I have a structure for our conversation in my head already. "Yeah, I do," he pouts, "locals are great, food is awesome, and I'm pretty happy here. How about you?"

"I never thought about it," I confess. "I see too many countries in too little time."

"Sounds like you're constantly bouncing beds."

What a terrible double entendre. I smirk cynically. "How well-put, Demyx. I am."

"You like flying or something?" he asks, stretching his arms out wide like he's absorbing the cool night air.

I think about it. "I fly first class with the other apprentices, but I don't really care. The service is fine, but I don't ask for much. And I've seen all the views before, so mostly the rides give me a feeling of dull indifference." Demyx has already done it- broken the barrier. I feel thoughts and things to say coming to mind like a flood; the thoughts about the plane rides must have been a broken levee. And what surprises me is that I don't feel any urge to bullshit him like every other one-night stand I've conversed with. "The rides are an opportune time to catch up on reading, I suppose. I can't write speeches or do any research notes on them, because I prefer to write longhand and even in the first class there is no escape from turbulence. So I get a lot of reading done."

Demyx looks at me. He appears surprised that I'm abruptly talking so much- pleasantly so. "Reading what?"

"Anything," I shrug. "The wonderful thing about every country I visit is that in every major city, there is a store filled with myriads of obscure titles. Sometimes one has to look, but if you know the right people the answers come easily. It's a little more difficult if I wish to read that work in its native language, but otherwise I'm never short of material."

"You sure sound like a book person, and you've been to all these places," Demyx notes, "but you're not worldly at all."

What he says is true. I'm not worldly, and the words brings a sad weight to my mind. "Do you know why there are so many books in the world, Demyx?" I say after a long time. It feels like we've been walking in our own sounds, our own padding against the concrete and our own breaths, for minutes now.

He shakes his head.

"Because no matter how hard it tries or how many words it pours out, and how enlightening it may be, no book perfectly does what it desires. It will never tell us everything. It will never capture the world completely, in all its essences and sensations. And every genre of book, every type of book, attempts desperately, but conclusively fail. Which is why there are even more categories and subcategories of books. Even the most well-read know nothing and everything at once. You just can't grasp everything in a man's mind, or in the world that encompasses it."

He smiles. "Funny to see a bookworm denouncing his own habitat."

I frown. "I'm not. Literature is far superior to many other forms of recreation or sources of knowledge." Frustrated, I fix my glasses.

Demyx shrugs and looks at me with helpless affection. "Sure you're not. What is it that you do, anyway, that gets you to read so much?"

"I speak," I answer concisely in the best answer that I know. "I stand on display and look intelligent. I'm a neuropsychological breakthrough, apparently."

The few people I've ever described myself to this way have tended to raise an eyebrow, look sad, and back away, but Demyx simply looks intrigued. "Okay, that's weird. I never slept with a guy like that before. You weren't too different from a normal guy who's good in bed," he winks. "So what's different about what you do?"

"Evidently I am something the scientists take interest in. For all I know, I do research, write articles and dissertations... All the likes that keep me afloat in a swirling world of academics."

"Jesus Christ, that sounds boring," Demyx concludes at last. "You hop on a plane, go somewhere, act intellectual, that's it?"

"Sadly, yes."

"It's your life," he murmurs.

I pause wistfully, gazing off into the glare of the streetlights. "Want to hear a confession about my life, Demyx?"

"Yeah?" he grins, apparently seeing some look in my eyes and liking what he sees a lot. He seems to know what I'm about to say, long before I speak.

"It's mostly a waste of time," I respond to him flatly. He chuckles, and the look he furtively shoots my way is one filled with ambivalence about my ideas.

He's still chuckling when he gestures me into an elevator. I'm puzzled as to where he's taking me, and as to why the elevator is small and smells faintly of spices, but Demyx puts his finger to his lips secretively and divulges nothing. The only thing I know is that we're going up, and that is only because I watch intently as Demyx presses a callused finger to the third floor button.

He snatches a kiss in the middle of my attempt to watch the numbers on the screen change, and that's ample distraction for me.

When we exit, it's straight into a bustle of what now smells strongly of spices, assaulting and seducing my olfactory senses alike. The floor is carpeted, and the entire, high-ceilinged and humongous room is an ambiently-lit one. Purple, regal pink, brown and deep green seem to paint this canvas, but from the sound of a trombone faint across the room, it's a sort of odd jazz club-cum-gambling-retreat-cum-restaurant. "It's not as classy as it looks, really. Mostly run by locals," Demyx whispers to me as he waves at the jaunty waitress who walks by us. He ushers me out upon a balcony, and I'm relieved. Beyond the smell of warm spices and cooking, there is a pervading stench of cigarette and drugs that runs abundant in that huge den, and I feel dizzy from it.

We sit at a small metal table, facing each other, both of us leaning against the high concrete railing that keeps us from the open expanse and street below. "I'm paying, by the way. If only 'cuz it's damn cheap here," Demyx says before greeting the waitress and receiving his menu. Absent-mindedly he talks to the girl in a language foreign even to this country, "How's your job going, Yuffie?"

She laughs, giving me a quick glance, before replying, "Boring as hell, as usual. Got the usual horny guys and drunks to take care off, but Cid beats 'em off for me," she grins. "Picked up a new boyfriend, have we?" she barely gestures to me. I pretend to be preoccupied with the menu. "He's hot."

Demyx sighs. "He's great. But we're still sort of hanging out."

"Excuse me." I mentally smirk when I see both of them jolt. "Just for now, could you get me just a cup of tea? Thanks."

"Uh, oh, yeah," the waitress, apparently called Yuffie, grins sheepishly at me, before winking at Demyx and all but running away.

Demyx stares openly at me. "Jesus. How many languages do you know?"

"Seven," I pretend to be indifferent, though my heart skips a beat. Am I throwing this out too much? Will he judge me for this? Once people get to know what's in my mind, as far as Demyx already has, then they tend to stop seeing me as human. There is too much of me that is detached from them- emotionally, intellectually, socially and physically, I don't quite make the humanity grade.

But Demyx doesn't back out. He doesn't even seem to realise I'm expecting him to start thinking about it.

"There goes my opportunity for illicit conversations, right out the window," he half-jests, then lets me smile to know he didn't say anything offensive. "You said you worked with some guys. Do they hate their careers too?"

I play along. "Not really. They spent most of their childhood dreaming about what they do now. I spent most of mine doing it, and I'm sick of it already."

Demyx looks at me keenly. "I'm willing you bet you weren't always such a die-hard pessimist."

I return his gaze with a dark, scrutinising look of my own, feeling anxious enough to readjust my glasses another time. "I wasn't."

"What changed?"

"I was born."

He bursts into small, hearty stifles of laughter. "That's really, really terrible," he sniffs.

Damn, I think. Damn it. This man is sweet. He's jaded and worldly and experienced and streetwise and everything I'm not, and he sweet. Is that even the word? He's gorgeous. I want to crush something, but I'm weak. I want to tackle him and take him on the floor. I doubt I've ever wanted to do that to anybody so desperately, and so completely sober. Passion never sweeps over me when I'm sober.

I'm working very hard not to appear disoriented or intoxicated by the sound of his laughter. "Terrible because it's true?" I murmur, but then decide I shouldn't push this topic. "You seem to enjoy life."

Demyx shrugs and smiles again. "It's because I just let go, man. I expanded my horizons. And I pleasured my senses beyond books and sex," he grins.

I return his smile. "Let go, huh."

()(())()

This time, I don't know what's happening. My mind is garbled and strewn in wet strings of food on the luxurious bed. Demyx is preoccupied kissing the trail of soft shapes that draw down my abdomen, and I am murmuring nothings like I mean them for once.

But I have it all in there- in my mind. The plan. The one I've laid out so much that it's a tired idea, but always brimming with a fresh idea, a fresh one-liner, a fresh way to say goodbye.

In the end, I don't leave any sweet witticisms on paper when I drag my suitcase out of the hotel room in the dead of the night. There are a lot of things I could write- I could quote Sartre on his line 'Man is condemned to be free', I could say that Vexen didn't need a vegetarian diet, I could tell Lexaeus that before Demyx, he was the only man I ever really remembered. Or I could just walk out, because I've already said everything in a very tired decade, and stopping to write down any more goodbyes is a waste of time, and a falter.

I arrive at the bottom floor, and Demyx is right outside, beaming. "You're crazy," I sniff with a smile. And then we walk into the night.

"Maybe. But I don't mind," he smiles.

I'm crazy. I certainly don't mind.

()(())()

"You're okay with this?"

Demyx is clutching a newspaper, and he looks more tired, older, than when I first met him. And he is beautiful. The faint noise of traffic can be heard three floors above the grimy streets, a tired grumble of cars just slaving to get home for the week. We tend to be downwind of the incense-scented temple, but that's what one gets when they take the many pleasures of living in a multicultural world. You learn to swear in six languages just by driving in rush hour traffic. But we still like our home. It's home, and it doesn't smell like plane air fresheners.

In Demyx's long, musical hands is a paper in the local dialect that I've picked up in the last two months. It's folded to one of the back pages, but my name is there, and my picture alike. I'm frowning like I disapprove of being printed in cheap ink on cheap paper, like I understood at the time that my face was going to be glanced at once on a sheet of faintly-malodorous paper and then used to clean up fruit cuttings on a tropical wet market floor. According to the paper, I'm missing. We both smile. Our little secret dances in the dusty air of our apartment.

"They're looking for me in a country like this?" I say, amused, unbuttoning the second button of my polo. Uncapping the French wine bottle, I pour us both a glass in two small translucent pink plastic cups. I hand him his. "They can try."

Demyx smiles back, and tosses the newspaper upon the pile of read scraps. His bare feet are slightly dirty on the soles, I notice as my eyes follow him around our small home. Downing the wine in one shot, he sets the cup down and picks up his sitar from where it sat like a diva upon the cheap couch, concealing the faint stains with its own personal dashes of colour. He plays completely spontaneously, just letting the feeling pour from his fingers.

And, I guess, it's a little beautiful.

terminus