What Have U Done?

"Now wait!" Becka jumped in, holding up both her hands in defense. "Before you just—brush it off as if it were nothing--,"

"How can you even look at this?"

"But aren't you in the least bit curious?" Pushing herself from the bed, Becka sank to her knees in front of him, taking his hands in hers, feeling an almost instant calm in his demeanor. "Why not? If it's bunker, then we'll bunk it, forget about it. Chalk it up to experience and call it a venture made. But what if, Ryan? What if we could? What if we could—do this—little thing and make things the way they used to be once, the way that they should be now? What if we could make it as if nothing bad ever happened back then, like it was all some sort of bad dream--?"

"This is stupid..."

"This is our chance! And if we're going to do it, we have to start it now."

His hand still atop the paper, Ryan started to push it away, only to feel Becka's hand over his giving his fingers a squeeze. And suddenly he couldn't look at her. After all the time that had passed between them, and all his time spent wondering how she'd faired out, and seeing her now, in the flesh, real as the breaths he took—it were as if they were back in time again. Back to that one day. "Why me?" he growled beneath his breath, keeping his eyes averted.

"Because you knew her longer—better than any of the rest of us. She told you everything, Ryan. Things that she never even told her mother she told you!" Forcing herself to laugh, Becka shook her head. "I never understood it, then, and, god help me, I was jealous of it. We all might have loved Liric, but if any of us was on the same frequency, it was you and her."

Shifting his jaw he felt it pop, and the words on the page as he looked at them began to blur, in and out of focus until he strained and struggled to read them. Finally he could read them again, and looked to where the way of the workings was listed. There was a list of questions there, blanks that were meant for the filling. Already the name had been filled out, though in pencil, and sloppily half erased along with a few other of the questions.

"I tried to answer them all," Becka confessed, laughing at herself as she lay her head to rest against his knee. "But after that day, I had forced myself to forget about her, to forget as much as I could, ya know? I didn't want to think about her any more after we graduated, I didn't want to remember her the way I'd seen her last."

Of course, no one else had really thought of it back then, so consumed in their own grief and mourning. How Becka had been with her—with Liric, the two of them walking out together, leaving the school. Becka was the one who had seen it, who had been there the entire time. Never once did they ever think of Becka, nor had they ever asked. It was just—forgotten.

"I could hear it, ya know? Those guys, a group of seniors, laughing it up in the parking lot like there was no tomorrow. And, really, me and Liric, we were already in the clear. But she had wanted to go back. She'd wanted to go back in because she'd forgotten to say good-bye to you." Taking a breath she composed herself, anything to keep from loosing that numbness she had worked so hard to build up over the passing years. "She was starting away from my car when I heard them getting into theirs. And I hadn't thought about it at first, you know, just seniors showing off; last year and everything else... Silly me, I should have seen it coming." She sighed. "I should have started back with her..." Gently pulling the paper from beneath his hand, Becka shift to set it in his lap, casting her eyes up to meet with his as she pleaded for his help, forcing herself to smile despite her disappointment in herself. "I'm so stupid. I've spent so much time forcing myself to forget that—I've forgotten. And now I can't even make out for her the simplest of profiles. Isn't that silly?"

Before leaving the dorm, Ryan made sure to put Becka to bed. As worked up as she'd gotten, it was the very least that he could have done for her. It gave him time as he unlaced her boots and pushed them only half way under the bed for her. Cleaning off her makeup for her with a damp, cloth and tucking her into bed. In the time that it had taken him to do all of that for Becka, Ryan had made his decision.

Back in his own dorm, Ryan took to sitting on the floor, the draw-string of his pants drawn taunt as he sat with his back to his bed, one leg folded before him as the other sat propped and half drawn up to his chest, his elbow propped atop it as that supported hand ran fingers through his hair, messing it. In his lap he held the papers, reading them over still. If he was going to do this, he was going to do this right; there couldn't be any mistakes about it.

Already he had finished the small profile, if that's what it could be called; wording it all as best his memory served him to describe the Liric he once knew. And it felt strange, to think of her again, and so in-depth. It were almost as if she were there sitting with him, as if he were looking at her there in his room and putting down on paper what he saw.

"Thirty days, huh?" he muttered, glancing over the paper for the tenth time that night.

There hadn't been a great many stores open that late at night, which limited his pickings for the thirty candles that were required. Scented and unscented, an assortment of only a few choice colors—really, anything but pink and the lavender that was offered. This limited his selection to the brown, the green the red and the white.

Taking up one of the white candles that he had had bought, Ryan struck a match and gave it a light, though he hesitated for a moment before reaching on to burn the virgin wick. "A candle a night for thirty nights," he said, taking the candle into his hand and moving it to sit atop the small dresser that stood at the foot of his narrow bed. "'To be lit and left burning until it's spent'." With a sigh he lowered himself back onto the floor, watching the flame as it danced beneath the warm light of the lamp. With a thousand thoughts a minute racing through his brain, Ryan lock onto just one. And so he chose one, and only one, to think of as he reached again, finally, to turn off the light that was on. "Good night—Liric..."

Sitting at the foot of the elaborate bed, Ryan watched Becka as she paced the floors of the room, clutching in one of her fists what remained of the profile that she had made for the spell. The light of the many candles flickered wildly as she passed them, the air about her pushing their flames to dance as the lengthy skirt of her costume attire swept across the floor along with the steady shuffle of her feet.

"Sit down, Becka. For God's sake, you're making me dizzy," Ryan groaned as he dropped himself back to lie down, minding the items that lay strewn across the bed, dragged out earlier for whatever reasons.

Becka shook her head as she continued to pace the floor, the black feathered wings at her back shifting and slightly shimmering as their false sheen caught the soft yellow light that lit the room. "I can't!" she insist with a shake of her head, shifting her fingers around the ashes that she held to still. "What have I done?" she asked; though the question posed was more of a statement as she didn't wait for Ryan's response. "I just—I mean, what if this is real, Ryan? What if what we're doing--,"

"Becka, you're making me ill..."

Badgering Becka as he was, really, he understood her distress and her reason for pacing the floor. He would have joined her if he could, on his feet and pacing from one end of the room to the other, had it not been for the nausea that he felt deep in the pit of his stomach. It seemed like forever that he lay there with his eyes open, only half listening to the party and festivities that went on downstairs in Becka's family home. The room around him seemed to be growing hotter by the second, like an inferno that only seemed to make him more ill the longer he remained where he was. His throat was tightening, and he could feel the room closing in on him. And it wasn't until he heard her, Becka as she collapsed with a gasp to the floor that he shot upright to sit, eyeing her as she eyed him.

"Did you--?" he asked, unable to form the words that swam in his head.

Becka nodded quickly, her brow glistening in the dim light with a thin sheen of sweat. With the quieted whimper that escaped her, Becka had conveyed it all, the feeling that overwhelmed her. The great illness that suddenly twist and wrenched at her stomach and dizzied her head, making it imposable for her to stand. Something had happened, and she could feel it—they both could. "Ryan, I--,"

"Don't," he said, raising his hand to cut her off. He had to get out of there, get out of that room. And it was his feet that carried him, that took him from where he stood and carried him to the window, throwing one leg out of the window and then the other without even thinking, preparing to drop himself to the ground with ease, just as he had so many times in his youth. "I—have to go," he claimed, his voice thick with his own assurance. "I have to go get Liric."

It was all that she could do to watch him, her eyes large as her jaw trembled, unable to speak. All her words had escaped her in an instant, rendering her silent and unable to call him back. It wasn't until she had heard the sound of his boot-heavy feet as they came to collide with the ground that she was able to leap from where she'd collapsed and rush as fast as her weakened legs would carry her to the window, clutching it's sill tight beneath both her hands being all that she could do to keep herself from bounding up and out to follow after him. "Ryan!" she called out to him. But already he was too far away, taking off like a mad man through the woods that lay just beyond the yard. The name escaped her with ease "Liric?" a mere breath as it escaped the hollow of her throat.

Faster and faster he ran, but it seemed that no matter how fast he ran through the darkness and through the woods, he couldn't escape the haze that seemed to surround him from all sides. The night, from what all that he could see was clear and the air was crisp—and yet, it all felt as if it were a dream to him; nothing but a dream. Through the woods and down that path he'd traveled over a hundred times, he knew where he was going, but at the same time he wasn't sure. It didn't make since. Everything had changed since then, the city, his friends, even him. He was a whole new person now, no loner the young boy that used to skip class and walk home early to catch some Z's before backtracking to meet up with his friends.

Out of the woods and into the open with a gasp of breath that was long since overdue, Ryan shot through the dark as he headed towards the main road and followed it as the northbound road curved east. How many times he'd road his bike down this stretch of road, how many times he'd walked it alongside his friends. He was about half a mile away from Becka's family home by now, and still going. Across another main road that snaked through the suburban area, splitting one area of housing from the others, segregating the houses from the apartments. And it was the apartment area that he'd crossed into, half tripping across the lawn as he made his way off of the sidewalk and through the beginning of the complex, well off the paved path.

There were kids all over trick-or-treating, yelling and screaming and laughing as they got the candy that they'd dressed for, pouting and whimpering and whining to the treats that they received that seemed more of a trick to them; the pennies, the fruits and the toothbrushes.

Down the hill and around the man-made pond, Ryan dodged around a small group of teens as they were smoking and laughing it up. His shoulder collided with one of them, though he wasn't exactly sure which. Whoever it was, they yelled, though their words were lost in the ways of the wind, never making it to his ear. They were unimportant to him, a mere obstacle in the way of his path.

Finally he could see it, his destination within his reach. The complex that held the apartment that housed—his Liric. He seemed to pick up his pace then, the closer he got to the building of painted wood and brick. Darting through the throughway, he rounded the corner and took the stairs, two at a time, sometimes three, as he raced his way to the top floor. And then, just as quick as he had run there, just as fast as he had made his way to that door, Ryan stopped; just short of kicking it down. And in an instant, everything around him, everything about him seemed to catch up to him in a flash, causing his head to spin and his legs to go weak at the knees. Overwhelmed by the sheer excitement of it all, Ryan collapsed with a thud against the door, falling down the length of it until he came to sit at its very threshold, his breaths heavy and uneven.

With unsteady fingers, he felt along the lower most half of the door, its every dent its every scrape and scar. No matter how many times they had painted over it over the years, it was still the same door that he had come to years before, kicking and pounding at it with his fists when he'd been denied what lay beyond the other side. The many times that he and Jess had stumbled up stupid and ran into the door dead-on. So many memories over so many years that had passed, it seemed like a whole other lifetime.

Reaching up he grasped the knob of the door, giving it a turn, not in the least surprised to find it locked. But that was hardly a problem as he had solved it a many times before. Using his feet to push him, he inched his spine up the length of the doorframe, taking his time in standing again as his hand reached into his back pocked and pulled from it his wallet. Taking only a moment, Ryan glanced back and over his shoulder to make certain that all was clear before he slipped the card in what little an opening he could find between the door and the frame, tricking the lock open with ease.

Inside the apartment was dark, and he moved slowly beyond the doorway, taking his time to carefully push the door closed behind him. The silence that surround him as he made his way inside was deafening, all of the doors and windows closed, locking out any sounds of the trick-or-treating children. He smiled, making his way through the dark to where the orange light from the outside just barely crept through the shadings at the balcony window, his hand reaching up he pushed it gently aside to peer out, looking back over the path he'd just come. It was strange, the feeling that he felt, being in there after all this time. Standing there as he was, he could swear that he could hear her, just as he had heard her then, laughing it up with the rest of them and serving up the special punch that she had made for their coming. "The perfect hostess," Ryan chuckled to himself, giving a shake of his head.

"Hello? Who's there?"

That voice, thought Ryan, so startled by the sudden second presence that his shoulder came to collide with the glass of the window as he'd jumped to turn around. As clear as anything else he knew that voice, and his heart skipped a beat as he'd thought about it, considered it, moving away from the window and towards it.

From down the hall is from where the voice had come, sounding like the sweetest of melodies as it echoed through the lonely dark; breaking through the silence like a brilliant burst of light. So radiant was that simple sound and the way that it had caught him off his guard that Ryan choked and clutched at his throat, struggling to catch his breath. But it was at the halls end that they appeared, like an apparition in the dark as he could only make out the silhouette of their form, draped in silken ivory that fitted the figure well and bellowed lightly about their ankles. And it was from where Ryan was standing that there was a single stream of light that fell along the length of the standing figure, showing to Ryan only parts and pieces of the person that stood there, questioning his own identity.

"I'm sorry," he apologized, his eyes narrowing as he peered into their one that was caught in that thin strip of light. "I—didn't know that anyone was here..." His voice trailed off and faded as he'd nothing more to say, no other words that he could think of to pardon himself for intruding as he had. And yet, unsteady as he felt for imposing, still he couldn't seem to shake it, the feeling of familiarity he felt towards this—apparition that stood only across the room from himself. "I'm sorry..."

"Ryan?" the young woman spoke, her voice still just as gentle through the think of the dark, though her tone of voice now was less afraid than it had been before. "Ryan, is that you?" Making her way through the dark, the young woman came to stand at Ryan's side, making her way into the light with ease as she extend her hand to his face, gently touching at his hair as she pushed it from his face, a quieted laugh escaping her as she spoke. "My god, you're a mess! What happened to you?"

"Liric--?" The word—the name had escaped him in a shallow breath, the last of his breath left in him. From within his chest pound his heart, so fast now that it ached as he could only stand there, watching her watch him, a vision if there ever was one; an apparition of his past, a figment of his boyhood imagination. Just as demure and alight with some inner radiance as she ever was, smiling to him with that smile that never seemed to lack in its reassuring capabilities. Surely—surely she was nothing more than the vision he thought her to be, with her silken garb of ivory with thin straps that gently hugged at her shoulders and strings of pearls that hung in three draping lines along different lengths of both her arms, that shift with the movements of those arms as she gestured at him with ease. Her movements so fluid and so sure. And how could he not have recognized them before, that shortened mop of mahogany, done in tight tendrils that framed the paled features of her face.

She laughed, the sound of her laughter like the gentle tinkling of a small bell as she reached up to the false horns that he donned atop his head, giving them only the slightest of taps. "Aren't you a sight!" she said with a smile, her lips frosted in such a color that matched the coloring of and about her eyes; silver with only the slightest hint of slate for a touch of color, making her every feature appear only that much more pale in comparison. "So handsome," she spoke again, a mischievous purr to her tone. "It's no wonder that that a soul would flirt with Death."

"Liric..." he uttered again, all other words escaping him as he stood there, dumbfounded by the very sight of her.

Shaking her head she laughed again, taking a step back as she gave a twirl, the width of the silken skirt expanding in a gentle, floral-like flow. "Do I look that bad?" she asked, a ring of sarcasm in her voice. "If so, take it up with Ming. She is, after all, the one who dressed us all for this. Though—I swear, we don't give her enough credit for the work we put her through every year--," Staggering back a mere step or two from where she stood, Liric was unable to finish what it was she had been saying as she was suddenly embraced in Ryan's arms, his hold so tight about her that she struggled at moments to breath, her face buried in the dark cloth of his costume, his strong hands massaging, one at the small of her back and the other between her shoulder blades, touching the bare flesh of her skin. But just as quickly as she had come to feel shocked by his sudden approach she calmed, her smile returning and softening as she turned her head to the side, resting, instead, her cheek against him as she lift her arms behind him to return the endearing gesture. "Ryan," she whispered softly, she as she could suddenly feel his body trembling uncontrollably against her own.