AN: Drabble, I guess, since it’s actually just on the 500 word mark, but it didn’t feel like that when I wrote it.

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Sometimes she’s gone. He can tell from her expression, from her eyes and the slack curve of her back and especially in her hands. If her hands aren’t moving, he knows she’s not there. They’re always fluttering around, those hands, gripping a pencil or an arm or skimming lightly over a sheet of paper. When they go limp, he knows it’s over for today if he wants her to jump and skip and enthuse and just be her. So he always tries, at first, to pull her back up out of that particular pit, snuffling into her neck in the way he knows makes her giggle, grins, bounces, and nearly makes a fool of himself but escapes by the skin of his teeth looking, hopefully, cool.

She’s padding along softly, drowning in her giant blue polarfleece sweater. It’s like she wants to vanish into it, melt and wash away, away, until she’s somewhere so so far from this place where she can just… breathe.

She told him once that sometimes she feels like she has something bleeding in her chest, it’s going drip, drip, drip, in a place she knows her heart is supposed to be.

She doesn’t see him. She doesn’t see anything right now, all she sees is a world full of nothings. Nothings that spew noises and judgments and expectations and expressions at her that she doesn’t understand. She can’t understand them now, and so she doesn’t try, content in her desire to sink into a book or a song or a dumb boys love manga and stay there.

He watches her open her locker, lean into it like it’s the only thing supporting her in this world, her head resting against the metal edge of the shelf, hair falling over the side of her face. He watches for what feels like hours, but he knows it can’t be because it’s passing time and the bell hasn’t rung yet, until he can’t stand it anymore to see her there looking so small even though she isn’t.

He comes over and wraps his arms around her, head under his chin, thin arms relaxing around his waist when she sees it’s him. He pulls her close as he can, and closes his eyes to her warmth, and oh, she’s so soft.

He wants to keep her wrapped up in the cocoon of his arms forever, but he knows he has to let her go, the bell is ringing and people are scrambling about to get to class. But she isn’t moving, and her eyes are closed, and she feels so soft and breakable that…

He releases her with difficult and hides his blush, striding away towards biology.

She quickly grabs her English binder and bangs her locker shut.

They glance back at each other, just a moment. A smile, a slight nod. A promise.