[a/n]: i haven't been satisfied with anything i've been writing for the other things i've got going on, so i'm writing prompts for other characters that exist. you guys can request anything you'd like to see, an example being idk wyatt and tiffany schmidt hiding a dead body. these will be considerably short, between 500-2k words. this is mainly for me to develop my writing style and explore characters in settings that wouldn't fit the story their in. anything that is posted here does not affect the canon-verse of the story the character belongs in. sometimes there will be people here that you won't recognise, and those will be characters from things i'm planning to write. so there's this to read sometimes
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Idris is a bad guy who is good at things.
He's good at Math, at driving for forty minutes every Sunday to go and visit his Grandma at the home, at being the South Indian person of colour representative in a town with a majority white population, at getting people to trust him, at practising his faith after falling out of love with it when he was an impressionable teenager, at fighting with punches instead of words, at pretending to be dead.
So—Idris sits in a airport on his twenty fifth birthday, a layover on his way to isolation in the Bahamas, reflecting on all of the things he's good at, and it's quite an impressive list: holding his alcohol, not wincing when he swallows whiskey, not wincing when he swallows, swallowing back words he wished he'd said before he turned into a coward. Falling off of the face of the earth is much easier than trying to choke out words that would have made them stay, it's easier to run away than turn to his problems head on and deal with them like any other adult in their twenties.
It's also easier to get another drink from the bar when he notices who is sitting next to him. Idris had thought he'd done a decent job of staging his death, being caught at a nightclub on a busy night, making a show of drunkenly getting into his car, crashing the car into a tree and having it roll down a hill, letting the car set on fire before having a pedestrian call the police. Idris spent most of his teen years watching crime shows, he knows how to stage a scene and do it well.
There'd been no grand funeral, hardly anyone had showed up, it'd been an empty coffin, his grandmother, and anyone else who could be bothered to pretend they had any sort of relationship. In all of the great stories, everyone cries at the funeral—his grandmother didn't even remember who he was.
"You're pretty happy for a dead man," they say to him, angling their body to watch how his hand shakes as he reaches for the glass. "A life spent on the Bahamas, that's what you've always wanted, huh?"
"Why are you here?"
They scowl at him, the weight of all of the things left unsaid, of all of the things that were said pushing their eyebrows down. Idris doesn't like when things are left open, when he's allowed to bleed for wounds that should already be healed—and this is one of them, it's one of the only things he's been bad at, a flame that burnt him as he tried to run away. "Someone had to start the conversation we need to have. You'd never do it."
"There's nothing to say," Idris grunts. A lie. There are things that should be said, but Idris can live with the weight that would slowly crush his chest flat if he stays silent, he's gone three months doing so already, what would be forever? Forever would be remembering how things were left off, remembering what it was like whilst it lasted, remembering what he's thrown away, remembering what the flames from his car felt like so close to his skin, what it felt like to go through such efforts to make a lie he'll never be able to resolve.
"I love you," they say. A hand falls on his, yellower and darker, the dregs of the drink in his hand. "And I know you do, too." Their hand clenches as the boarding call is made, as the goodbye comes swinging in full force, as it becomes something that neither of them can stop. Idris knows it could have been avoided, it could have been something to think about the possibility of it ever happening, not brood on the actuality of the conversation.
Idris is a bad guy who is good at things. At squeezing fingers he'll never touch again, at stepping away from the bar, at turning his back on them, at walking to the gate, at boarding a plane to a place he'll never leave, at not really saying goodbye, at not returning the words that would have taken away the weight on his chest.
