Eventually

Chapter Eleven

A.N. FIRST PUBLISH OF THE NEW YEAR! So I'll take this opportunity to wish you all a great New Years, and I hope you enjoy this latest chapter. I've switched back to Arthur's POV, and word of warning, this chapter is very reflective, and shows quite a few flashbacks. Hence the baby gif of lil Freddie. I hope you like it. Xoxo, Clay. 

Chapter Eleven

June 18th 1999 - Arthur Valgari

I remember the day that it all started, the day that I met Freddie Pepper. It was my first day of school, in a new town. My family used to live in a twenty-story high apartment building in Basingstoke, just outside London. It was a big town, and our apartment was near the top floor, up an old elevator that rattled and creaked.

I don't remember much about the apartment anymore, other than my father's corpse sprangled over the floor after he killed himself in 1989. After that, my mother started regularly popping pills, and then we decided to move. So we came to a big town on the English eastern coast, in Suffolk, a place called Ipswich.  That was where I met Freddie Pepper.

I was suddenly surrounded by kids that I didn't know, kids that scared me. I was something near six years old, the first time I laid eyes on the boy who'd become the most important thing in my entire life. I couldn't possibly have known it at the time, barely a few feet off of the floor, but the kid in front of me, he'd imprint on me for life, he'd become something living in my skin. From that day onwards, we were the best of friends.

What I saw, the first time I laid eyes on him, he was a scruffy kid who smiled an awful lot and had a funny way of laughing - something that I'd pester him about for years to come - but, after a while, I'd only be able to see something else when I looked at him. An immense kind of connection, the most tremendous and unspoken kind of relationship you could share with someone.

We were soulmates, not that either of us had a clue the day we met. And not that the day we met even mattered that much to me. We'd known each-other so long after that, for so many more days, and they were all as meaningful and precious to me as the first.

For as long as I could remember, Freddie had always been there, with his scruffy blondish hair and eyes like giant green saucers, my best friend in the whole world. The kid I'd always turn to, and the kid who'd always turn to me. When he was bullied, or when he needed someone to talk to, it was me. I was there for him, for years and years.

The day I met him, I'd stumbled into the classroom on two left feet, and while the other kids liked to laugh and make fun of me, the only one who didn't was Freddie. He smiled and pointed at the empty chair next to him. When I sat at my own empty table, avoiding the general population, he hopped up and forced himself down beside me, determined to be my friend. That was one of the first things I found out about him: he was determined. If he went after something, he'd eventually get it. He'd grab it and cling on tight.

"I'm Freddie," he said, practically beaming to have met someone new. I later learned that he usually beamed at most things in life. Things I'd usually look straight passed, simply because we had different perceptions on life. I'd look outside and see an empty sky. I'd frown and sigh and stay indoors. Freddie, he'd look up and see endless possibility, freedom. He'd go out and play in the grass. By nature, we were pieces of a different puzzle. We didn't particularly go well together at all, and yet somehow, despite that bullshit, we did anyway.

"I'm Arthur," I remembered I'd told him.

And just like that, as easy as saying two words to each-other, it all started, a friendship so strong that it was so much more than that, a connection so genuine and simple that it would only be a matter of time before it became something more.