Impulsions

He has many. Many little ticks, quirks, oddities. Things that he does, but he does not know that he does them. He pushes his glasses up his nose - adjusts them, corrects them - for nearly the tenth time in the hour. He unbuttons and rebuttons the cuffs on his coat, sometimes leaving them uneven depending on the shake in his hands.

He smokes, which is a habit that he is all too aware of. He rolls his eyes at the comments -

“Those will kill you, you know!”
“But you're a doctor, surely you should know how much harm those do!”
“I can’t imagine what your lungs look like,”

- and he knows they mean well. They’d had chance after chance to kill him over the years. Now, he is essentially daring it to become true with each smoke he lights. It started as just one here and there with his coworkers, to a couple over late nights at his desk, to a pack throughout the day. He’s lost count of them now, and he prefers to keep it that way. Ignorance is bliss, as they say, and bliss is something that rarely finds him.

And when he can’t smoke… He’s chewing. On his pens, on toothpicks, on his fingernails. The solution to that, he’s found, is a cup of coffee. He is very rarely seen without his cup of coffee.

Now the one that is truly uncontrollable…

- - -

“You always do that when you’re stressed.”

A voice pulled Kerelas out of his thoughts, mind churning both over everything and nothing. His patients, his pile of paperwork, the last time he’d gotten sleep (a week ago..?), and just about anything else that could be weighing on his mind; no issue was too small. There was something about a busy coffee shop that simply let his thoughts go wild, tangling with the conversations of those around him until it became one big hot mess of thoughts- thoughts that he could hardly separate out into his own.

He must have been giving a rather confused look, for the other man looked to his hand. Kerelas’ gaze followed it, lip twitching at the sight of his thumb anxiously rubbing at the golden band on his finger. With a sharp breath, he curled his hand into a fist and pulled it away from the table.

“Well then, I suppose I shouldn’t try my luck at poker, should I,” He replied with a sigh, resting his elbows on the table and plucking off his glasses to rub at his eyes. He let his blurred vision settle on the man who sat across from him, nearly undefinable in the light of his terrible vision, if it wasn’t for his striking blue hair.

Kerelas always thought of Emryn to be a bit of a strange one.

“I’m sorry, I’m just…” Gods, he couldn’t even describe it. He never could. It always came out as one simple word: “...tired.” And even then, it just felt like a lame excuse. Everyone was tired. He wasn’t special.

He positioned his glasses back where they belonged, blinking as he wrapped his cold fingers around the heat of his coffee mug and looked back to Emryn with a small smile despite his wearied gaze, “Please continue.”

Emryn only laughed, a soft chuckle as he leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “Kerelas, I have been getting weekly coffee with you for nearly twenty years now. I am used to - and not bothered by, by the way - talking to…” He casually waved his hand in a gesture towards the doctor with a brief hesitation. “Well, a wall. And that’s okay. You’re lucky I like to hear myself talk.”

Kerelas smiled, pulling his coffee closer and letting the steam tickle at the scruff on his jaw as he leaned over it. His smile turned a bit sly as he looked to his friend with a little sparkle of mischief in his eye. “You can hear yourself talk? And here I was thinking you were getting old.”

“You’re older than me!” Emryn laughed, turning a few heads with his loud, booming voice.

“Barely,” Kerelas muttered, raising his coffee mug to his lips with a halfhearted smirk, taking a sip before setting it back down with a soft clink against the table. He was about to open his mouth to speak before his friend interrupted him, leaning forward and nodding to the ring on his finger again.

“Insults aside, though, why do you do that?”

Kerelas paused, glancing down to the ring as he waded through the muddy waters of his thoughts. He still hadn’t confirmed the state of his family. Everyone knew he had a wife and daughter. Everyone knew that they were not here. Very few knew why.

“Oh, it just… makes them feel close, you know?” He said slowly, not able to pull his gaze up from the golden band until the last word left his lips. It was then that he let it settle back on Emryn with a soft sigh. There was no mistaking the shift in his tone though- a sad one, almost. “We are living in a storm and we all need a sense of calm. My family is that calm for me, I suppose. Always has been.”

Emryn paused for a moment, a flicker of understanding softening his grin as he reached for his own coffee, long forgotten in the conversation. “Well, one of these days, I will have to meet this family of yours with the way you talk about them.” He said as he took a sip. “They sound lovely.”

Kerelas nodded, his chest twisting as he knew that would not happen. They were… dead, as far as he knew, and even if they, by some miracle, were still out there… his friend’s lifespan was not as long as his own.

So the best he could offer was a lopsided grin and the only lie he’s ever told.

“You will.”