Wes dreamt he was back in elementary school.

He was sitting at the bright yellow metal table in the play yard with his childhood best friend, the only other Key his age he’d ever known.

Yuriy.

Yuriy was wearing that ridiculous aqua-colored jacket he had worn that entire winter, his hauntingly light blue eyes directed at him, his gaze too wide, almost like they were doll eyes. Yuriy had looked like a perfect little china doll - pale white skin, platinum blond curls, a tiny smile frozen on his lips.

‘You’re like me.’ Yuriy said to Wes without moving his lips.

Wes hadn’t even known what that meant, but Yuriy had been and still was on an entirely different level than Wes. He could tell everything about you with just one glance and could make you do whatever he wanted in half that time.

Wes was dreaming of Yuriy a lot lately, which usually meant the freaky little dude was somewhere nearby, their mental bubbles overlapping and picking up on one another. 

He wondered if Yuriy dreamt of their first meeting as well when they were in close proximity- while Wes dreamt of little china doll Yuriy and his stupid fucking aqua jacket, did Yuriy dream of Wes in his obnoxious red overalls, doing the chimney sweeper dance from Mary Poppins in response to the statement Yuriy projected into his mind?

Or did Yuriy dream of the last time they were together, when they were teenagers and Yuriy was being yanked out of the passenger side door of Wes’s jeep by the feds? Did Yuriy dream of Wes’s screams, or the way Wes got grabbed by the Lock and hurled against the hood of his car when he tried to make the men in black suits let Yuriy go? Did he dream of Wes getting the shit kicked out of him by the Lock with the red hair?

Wes didn’t dream of that whole scene often, but it did sit at the back of his mind sometimes, especially whenever they talked about a Key getting arrested on tv. Bag of Dicks - his older brother - still had a video recording of the day Yuriy was arrested and would play it every Christmas just to torment Wes. But the video had cut away before Wes had gotten brutalized by the red-haired Lock, so thankfully he didn't have to see that every year.

Not that he needed to, since the memory of it came back to him ever so often all on its own.

Suddenly he and Yuriy weren't small children anymore, meeting for the first time.

They were twelve, and it was the end of winter, when the snow still covered everything in his hometown and the surrounding towns, but it was no longer sparkly and fresh. It was dirty and mixed with the mud, and it smelt like earth instead of ice. He and Yuriy were walking home together after a very average, boring day at school, one of the seemingly countless days they had spent glued to each other's side. They had just left a convenience store and were walking alongside the dirt road in Maryfield, wasting time before Yuriy's mom could come and pick them up.

Wes was stuffing his face with gummy candy while Yuriy sipped his soda like the posh fuck he was. 

He remembered vividly that it was a very bitter, cold afternoon, and Wes's scarf and jacket smelt like his mother's cheap jasmine perfume and her hair spray.

It was so quiet. 

And then Yuriy looked at him then with those wide, wide china doll eyes, his pale lips pulling into a long - too long! - smile. Yuriy asked in his soft, velvet voice if Wes wanted to see something cool -

Wes awoke with a startle - someone was pounding on his front door.

He rolled off of his bed, tripping over the shirt on the floor before he fell sideways, nearly slamming into the wall before he hit the ground on his shoulder. He scrambled to his feet and hurried to the front door to press his face against it to look through the peephole.

He couldn’t make out who was outside.

Wes scowled and pushed away from the door. “What the fuck, man?!” He shouted at it, “What?! What do you want?!”

There was silence for a minute before the pounding started again.

“Dude! Fuck off or I’m calling the cops!” He snarled. 

The hair on the back of his neck rose and he whipped around to see his apartment was empty, but he could feel Yuriy poking around, making himself known, feeling around the outside of Wes's mind as if to check it was all still there, still stumble fucking through life and having coherent thought.

So Yuriy was close by.

Wes let out a harsh breath before he sucked as much air into his lungs as he could, blowing it out to try and focus and locate the other key.

The pounding on the door started up again but Wes ignored it to wander around his apartment before going to the one window in his apartment, located in his small living room. 

He tossed aside the curtains to look out, but there was just a misty, dreary-looking night outside, the streets empty. He held onto the window frame and slowly closed his eyes, his face screwing up in concentration as he tried to feel around for Yuriy’s presence. 

But Yuriy's presence was gone.

Wes opened his eyes and pushed open his window to poke his head out, twisting to look up at the sky - a pair of faint red lights blinked high in the sky, signaling a plane, and he smiled to himself, chuckling as he saw a bright star moving along between the two red dots - Yuriy.

Always miles above him - in talent, in appearance, and in all other things. The only time he ever sensed Yuriy was when he was flying over him, which made sense. Wes was in a small, entirely boring city that had little to offer someone like Yuriy, who was at the top of his field, went to the best schools, and had an entire world of new and interesting people around him. His childhood friend was always at the big military bases outside the real big cities, never in one place for too long. 

There was no reason for him to ever be where Wes was other than to fly over it in passing, which was about a dozen times a year.

The pounding got harder and Wes's smile fell off his face as he rolled his eyes and pulled his head back inside to scowl. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Wes screamed at the person pounding on the door before he went to his bedroom, slamming the door to flop face down on his bed and bury his head under his pillow.

The pounding continued for a further two hours before he was finally left alone.