bealusith

[bealusith]

a surprise

an extra chapter in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Sascha acts on impulse.

[Dec. 31st] Friday 16:28

Sascha didn’t want to be in Hamburg.

All this time, he’d thought that once he had made plans to spend New Year’s Eve with his dad, there was no reason good enough to keep him in Berlin. It just wasn’t how plans worked. Sascha had promised to be there; his dad expected him to come, and so did everybody else. He didn’t want to – obviously – but he didn't make decisions based on what he wanted in a given moment. He wasn’t impulsive.

But when he got off the train, he realized that he had made a mistake.

He’d thought that just because he and Isi had been together every day for the past week, he couldn’t cancel on everyone to keep it going.

It actually had been less than a week, and sometimes, when he was by himself, Sascha still had to remind himself that it was real.

He’d wake up smiling, without knowing why, and when he remembered, it felt too good to be true.

It took him a while to get used to it. He had been watching what he said and did around Isi for so long that he didn’t know how to stop now that he didn’t have to. He had never been a very spontaneous person. Anytime he kissed Isi, he had to make a deliberate decision to do it. Anytime he told her how he felt, he carefully weighed his words. Not because he didn’t want to be honest, but because he didn’t know how else to speak.

When they were together, there was always a moment – a split second – when Isi was gone, and Sascha was still stuck in his head, thinking. It made him nervous. In his head, he was always alone, wondering if it had been as serious for Isi as it was for him, if it could be, what it meant if it wasn’t. He wondered if it simply was the sort of thing that Isi did – would do with somebody else if Sascha wasn’t there. But then Isi would casually bring out his mother’s special porcelain, and be so sweet, that Sascha couldn’t help believing that it was real after all.

Every time he did something out of proportion – like surprise Isi and Umut at the kaufhaus, rather than wait until Isi came home – a part of him was scared that this would be the time that he’d be left feeling like an idiot. Isi wouldn’t notice that Sascha was there, and Sascha would realize that he might as well not have been – that he’d came all this way for nothing. But every time, that part of him had been wrong. In the end, he was always glad that he’d let Isi know how stupid she made him.

He felt as if something deep inside him that he had once stamped down was growing back.

Still: he went to Hamburg.

He didn’t like the city. He didn’t like his dad’s apartment, because it was always messy, and he didn’t like it when his dad acted as if cleaning up his shit didn’t fit with the post-divorce lifestyle he had imagined for himself. He hated it when his dad brought up mom, and made her out to be a control freak who had never let them have any fun. He’d say it as they were eating Chinese takeaway in front of the TV, something like, bet your mom wouldn’t like that, huh, and then he’d offer Sascha a beer. Sascha didn’t say that, actually, he liked eating at the table, and he didn’t watch football, and he liked the food he made himself better than anything he ever had at his dad’s, who never cooked, and used to call Sascha to ask how to microwave a ready-made meal from the store.

Once his dad really got going, he often ended up telling Sascha to be careful with women, or else they’d take over his life. “Sure, dad,” was all Sascha replied. He wasn’t going to come out to him. He had been accumulating leaflets pins, and little paper flags from the Queer Youth centre at both of his rooms – his room at his dad’s, and his room back home. His mom had picked up on it, and his dad had not. Sometimes Sascha wasn’t sure if his dad realized that Sascha was, like, a fully developed person, and that he wasn’t going to grow out of being different from him.

But Sascha took it and never said anything, because he knew that he was never going to do what his dad wanted from him the most. His dad thought that it was his fault that Sascha hadn’t gone to a proper school: he’d been busy with work and he’d let Sascha’s mother take care of it, and look how that turned out. She had let Sascha waste his potential. It went to show that you couldn’t have a woman who’d chosen to be a primary school teacher making any decisions about other people’s futures. But he, he knew that Sascha was smart, a good hard-working kid, and if he’d only got the opportunity, he’d make something of himself. His dad was going to get him an internship at his company – filing invoices, taking calls, simple ground floor-level work, and once Sascha got the hang of it, he’d move up in no time.

Sascha didn’t say anything when his dad gave him this speech, which happened every time he came to visit. He never agreed to his dad’s plan, but he never rejected it, either. He didn’t tell his dad when he’d finished the school and moved on to the apprenticeship. He never brought it up, because he knew that if he did, he’d only hear the speech again. He didn’t know when his dad was going to realize that Sascha had already committed. Carpentry wasn’t a weird hobby that he had, but something that he fully intended to do for the rest of his life. He didn’t know what would happen when his dad finally realized it was too late for Sascha to become a manager. He was afraid that they would be still talking about it when Sascha was forty, and his dad was a trembling old man. In the meantime, he bit his tongue, and gave in to his dad on everything else. He loved carpentry, and he’d hate to do what his dad did, but he still felt guilty for denying him this.

Arriving in Hamburg two days before New Year’s Eve, Sascha knew that he was going to hear the speech again, but for some reason, after tolerating it for years, now he couldn’t stand to even think about it. He had felt so light and loose with Isi, and he’d given it up – and for what? His dad went to the office every day, and didn’t come home until late. Sascha was going to spend most of his time playing Switch or, if he came out of his room, cleaning his dad’s mess, because he was physically incapable of ignoring it. His dad wasn’t even going to notice. On New Year’s, they’d go together with his dad’s friends to the central square, and watch fireworks in a crowd of drunk strangers, and nobody was going to wear a mask. And Sascha couldn’t even complain – it was his idea to come. When his dad asked if he wanted to visit, nobody forced Sascha to say yes. He was going to spend the next three days absolutely miserable, and he only had himself to blame.

When Isi texted him to ask how it was going, Sascha said that it was going fine. What else there was to say? That he was an idiot and he should have stayed? What good would that do now? Isi already had a lot going on. Sascha saw that they’d added their pronouns to their bio on Instagram. He commented on her post. He’d call her, but he worried that if they talked for longer than five minutes, he’d just start venting, and he knew that he’d regret it afterwards. He still really wanted to call her, and he was thinking about it when his dad began his speech again, and he was thinking about it when he said, “I’m not going to do it.”

“What?”

Sascha realized that he had just snapped at his own father.

“Sorry,” he said. “But I’m not going to work at the company. Or move here.”

“Sascha, you don’t understand-“

“No, I do,” he interrupted him. He had never done it before, but he felt that if he didn’t say it now, his dad would never get it. “I really do. I want to be a carpenter.”

That was Thursday night. His dad hadn’t said a word to him since then. On Friday, he went work, slamming the door shut behind him. Sascha wasn’t sleeping, anyway. He waited for the sound of the key turning in the lock before he went to get breakfast. He knew that his dad was upset because he was worried. He wanted what was best for Sascha, and Sascha was being stubborn and ungrateful. Sascha understood all that, and he understood that he hadn’t done anything wrong. It would have gone better if he’d been more careful with how he said it, but now that he had said it, he knew that he should have done it a long time ago. Still, he felt drained. He forced himself to finish his soggy cereal, and went back to bed. He sent Isi a good morning text and waited until she woke up and replied: a string of emojis. They were texting until Isi had to leave the house – he was meeting up with Lou for food and a pep talk before the show.

  i’m sorry i can’t be there, Sascha texted.

  its ok!!!  

  u have ur family stuff  

  i get it

Sascha stared at the screen.

 you’ll be great

  i know

  lol

  i mean

  im not even that nervous anymore

  i just think itd be nice if u were there to see it 🙈  

Sascha was going to jump out of the window. Why the fuck did he go to Hamburg. He sent Isi a red heart and a tomorrow, and then he groaned into his pillow.

He was still in his boxers at one in the afternoon when he got a notification that somebody had sent him a DM on Instagram. This had almost never happened in the few months of Sascha having an account (which he’d set up in the first place only because Isi talked him into it), so it caught him off guard. He would have felt better if he had his clothes on.

It was Lou. She had followed him after the party and sent him a it was good to meet you! Sascha had replied with a likewise!, but that was it – they didn’t talk.

The message Lou sent now was a picture of Isi, staring pensively out of window, chin propped on their hand.

  she’s pining…

It made Sascha smile until he remembered that he wasn’t going to see Isi tonight because he’d be out with drunk middle-aged divorced men.

 yeah me too

He didn’t expect Lou to message him again, but she did.

  i can come get you  

  now that rudi is up and running again

 haha

  i’m serious

  the offer is on the table if you want

Sascha paused. He checked the distance in Maps.

 but it’s 3h each way

  i know :)

Sascha had been miserable for the past day and a half, but now that he had the chance to get what he wanted, he hesitated. It felt an objectively insane thing to do. He had a train ticket for early afternoon tomorrow. He couldn’t ask Lou to spend six hours in a car. He barely knew her.

But she offered. And Sascha wanted to go.

 i’ll need to check with my dad

  okay

  let me know how it goes

Sascha closed the app and dialled his dad’s number. After several rings, he picked up.

“Sascha.”

“Hi. Er.” God, this was stupid. What if his dad just said no? “Would it be alright if I came back to Berlin for New Year’s?”

“Came back?”

“Yes. My friend has a car, she can pick me up.”

“You’ll do what you want,” his dad said shortly. “I need to get back to work.”

“Right. Sorry.”

The call ended.

So that went fine.

i did it, he texted Lou. i can go

  yes!

  i’m leaving in 30

Sascha sent her his phone number.

 you can send me a pin on whatsapp

  will do!

Sascha put his phone down. He couldn’t believe that it was happening. He could have changed the train ticket he had for tomorrow – he could have looked for a new one, he had enough savings to afford a ticket – but he hadn’t thought about it practically, like it was a real thing that he could do. He’d thought that he was stuck here.

When Lou arrived, delayed by the roadworks on the way to the city, Sascha had been already waiting at the curb. He had left the apartment half an hour earlier, because once he showered, dressed, and packed, all he did was pace and watch Lou’s pin crawl along the highway. She saw him standing outside, but she still blasted the car-horn when she stopped.

“What music do you listen to,” she asked once he’d got inside the car.

“Anything,” Sascha said, relieved that they wouldn’t have to make small talk for three hours.

“Anything. Okay.”

She picked up a small carton box from the floor and rifled through the cassette tapes inside it. The one she picked and slid into a cassette-player sounded like eighties heavy metal – or at least how Sascha imagined it. He wasn’t an expert.

“They are my dad’s,” Lou explained. Sascha hadn’t said anything. “I can’t really stick my phone into this,” she motioned towards the player, which did look pretty old, “so I have to make do with his tapes.”

“It’s okay,” Sascha said.

“It grows on you,” she reassured him.

Sascha was prepared to believe her.

He felt light-headed. He rarely acted on an impulse, so when he did, the sensation was so unfamiliar that it felt wrong. But then it passed. Sascha considered Lou, focused on the road. She looked like a good driver – a natural.

When they got to the roadworks on the outskirts of the city, she asked him to read the navigation to her. Sascha continued to read even after they’d moved onto the highway. It gave him something to do.

Sometime after the sunset, when Lou turned on the headlights, her phone rung. It was Constantin. Lou tapped the screen to pick up and put him on the speaker-phone.

“I can’t talk right now, I’m driving,” she said. “I’ll call you in a bit, okay?”

“…Okay.”

He hung up. Lou didn’t say anything. Sascha wondered how it was possible for Constantin to be a human being with Lou while he was a terrible asshole to everyone else.

They stopped at a gas station soon afterwards, because they were running low on gas, and Lou needed to pee. Sascha stayed inside the car and watched her disappear inside the store, the lights blinding against the dark. He leaned back inside his seat and looked around the car. It had been decorated very carefully. Sascha couldn’t see its ceiling from behind the stickers. Bands he didn’t know, clenched fists, antifa, shouting women… A rainbow flag. Sascha looked out of the window. Lou was in front of the store, talking on the phone.

“I brought dinner,” she said when she came back, showing off packets of mini-pretzels and sour patches. She stacked the pretzels and patches together in her hand, and put that into her mouth.

Sascha had forgotten that he was hungry. He took a pretzel.

“Nice sticker,” he said after a while.

“Which one?”

Sascha pointed at it.

“Ah,” Lou said, looking up. “My ex got it for me.”

Lou’s tone of voice was entirely neutral, so Sascha wasn’t sure how to respond. “Do you still keep in touch?”

“Nah,” she said, taking a wide turn. “She blocked my number.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It is what it is. We broke up when I was moving. I mean, we weren’t really dating, but we had this huge fight about it. Anyway. I thought with guys there’d be less drama in my life.”

“Hah.”

“I know.” Their eyes met in the rear-view mirror.

“Isi never said anything,” Sascha said, because it surprised him: Isi told him everything, and for a solid month, Lou had been all he talked about.

“I never told him,” Lou replied. “I didn’t want him to think… I don’t know. It got so messy anyway.”

Sascha remembered that he hadn’t been looking at the navigation.

“There’s a roundabout three kilometres ahead,” he said.

Lou nodded.

“That’s why I wanted to do this,” she went on. “I haven’t always been a good friend to him.”

Sascha considered reassuring her – it was what he did – but he suspected that she was right. He wished that she hadn’t brought it up. He wanted to like her, because Isi adored her, and because she was self-assured and direct, and had a way of speaking that made Sascha feel as if they had never been strangers. It seemed as if she had no need to censor herself, and didn’t expect others to be embarrassed of themselves, either. Sascha appreciated it. But when he thought back to the month Isi had spent obsessed with her – their fight in the stairwell after she had posted the story – Sascha remembered thinking, furious, that Lou treated Isi like a toy. Now, she was nearing the end of a six-hours long drive she’d gone on because she wanted to make Isi happy. This had to be more important than what Lou had or had not done in the past.

They got stuck in the traffic on the way to the city, the lines of cars stretching to the barely visible intersection. Sascha checked the time on his phone. It was almost 7 PM, and the show was starting at 8.

“We’ll make it,” Lou said.

“Mhm.”

“Come on. Want to send them a selfie? At least they’ll know we’re on our way.”

Sascha looked up at her. “No,” he said. “I want to surprise them.” He wanted to see the look on Isi’s face when they saw him.

The lined moved slightly. When they stopped again, Sascha passed Lou a small black leather backpack that had been rolling on the floor under the backseat for the previous two and a half hours and she did her make-up, checking that it was right in the rear-mirror. It reminded Sascha of Isi like nothing else had. He had to be getting ready now, too. Sascha had sometimes watched him put his make-up on if Isi was meeting his fancy friends afterwards. Sascha felt oddly privileged to be let in on what felt like such a private moment, but even more, he felt that Isi didn’t care if Sascha saw him or not. Sascha had been like air. But then, Sascha remembered watching Isi take his make-up off the night after the Christmas dinner. That was different.

He realized that they were out of the traffic jam and pushing 50 kilometres per hour. Lou was grinning, her glittering hoops flashing with the reflection of the streetlights. Sascha felt himself grin back. He looked at the navigation. They would be at Isi’s in less than ten minutes.

Lou parked her car near a stand with New Year’s party junk. Fireworks, those stupid novelty glasses, cat ears, tiaras, party hats, tinsel boas, multi-coloured beads, foil-horns, blowout trumpets. Sascha stopped, because in the middle of the stand, there were bee headbands.

“Give me a sec,” he told Lou, and left to spend the last seven euro he had in cash. The antenna was made of paper and covered in silver spray. “It’s our thing,” he explained. Lou only shook her head.

“So how do we do this,” she asked after Sascha punched in the code to open the door to the staircase. “Do you go first, do I go first…”

“You go. I’ll wait.”

“Okay. And I’m not telling her that you’re here.”

“Yeah.” Sascha looked at her. “Is this stupid?”

“What? No!” They were at Isi’s door. “Now put your headband on.”

Lou went in. Sascha put his headband on and took a deep breath. It was stupid. If he was being honest, it was one of the most stupid things he had ever done. He had gone into a fight with his dad, and made his mom worry on New Year’s Eve, and wasted a train ticket his dad had bought for him. All he had to eat today was a bowl of cereal and a handful of pretzels, so if he had as much as a single beer at the party later, he’d be out long before midnight.

But he wanted to be here - and now he was.

#druck #saschisi #okay that's IT from me. see you all in spring.

[bealusith]

would you write a post canon fic about isi and sascha? i already miss your great writing 🥺

hi! ‘return to the heart’ is definitely done; it did start out as a series of very loosely connected bits, but towards the end I did get a sense of an arc I wanted to bring to a satsifying conclusion, and I can’t do that if it just keeps going. I certainly enjoy writing about Isi and Sascha (and others), but I do need plot - like, a problem to solve. I hope that season 8 will give me some crumbs to think about!

#i really really hope that isi - if they feature at all - will be in character & not supportive background friend no. 3 #which is what happened to kieu my and fatou. yes the social media stuff was cute but where was the SUBSTANCE. #anyway. #replies

[bealusith]

Chapters: 15/15 Fandom: Druck | SKAM (Germany) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Sascha Belin/Isi Inci, Isi Inci & Lou Schäfer Characters: Isi Inci Additional Tags: Character Study, Missing Scenes, Canon Non-Binary Character Summary:

When Isi looked at his friends, it seemed to him that they had been hitting all the checkpoints on the route to becoming a real person, while he was still stuck at the starting line.

#druck #saschisi #she's done!

[bealusith]

the universe is full of roses

the last chapter in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi and Sascha say goodbye.

[Dec. 29] Wednesday 19:31

Isi didn’t want Sascha to go. When Sascha was packing, Isi stole his clothes and put them on. Sascha couldn’t leave without his winter jacket, and once Isi had it, it was surprisingly difficult to take off. When Sascha pulled at the sleeves, Isi wrapped his arms around himself and hid his hands in his armpits. He wasn’t going to give it up. Sascha dragged his arms open and, holding his wrists, asked very firmly that Isi let him pack. He didn’t want to miss his train, and he had to get tested at the station first. Isi pouted. He wished that Sascha had to stay, and that they had to quarantine together, like in the beginning. But he knew that he had to let go. Sascha needed the jacket. Afterwards, Isi simply sat on his bed and moped.

“Come on,” Sascha said when he’d noticed. “It’s not fair. You know I have to go.”

Isi didn’t, but they didn’t say so. They didn’t know why Sascha couldn’t cancel his tickets and tell his dad that something important had come up. Sascha didn’t even like his dad. He had to go because he had to go. It was stupid. But Isi didn’t want to waste the last bits of time they had together on being annoyed. They’d laid down and, telling Sascha which shirts to pack for New Year’s, waited for him to finish it and pay attention to them.

Even after they’d spent almost an hour making out, they were too early at the station. When they got to the testing centre, there was no line. Sascha was out in twenty minutes, and they had hours until his train left – too few to go back home, too many to spend on the seats in the hall, with nothing but the schedule flashing on the large screens to entertain them. They got shitty coffee from the vending machine and a bag of salted peanuts to share, everything else being too overpriced, and went on a walk by the river.

Isi stopped every now and then to take a picture of a roof – transparent glass, the sky visible above – or of the river, black against the washed-out white walls of the canal. It was funny: she felt as if she and Sascha were tourists who’d never been to Berlin before, and the only reason anyone looked at them was because Sascha had his bag, and Isi had his plant, and they were stopping every five minutes to take pictures. Isi held the pot under her arm, the leaves brushing her cheek, her phone in her other hand. She wanted to take pictures of every cliché landmark, and of Sascha in front of it. Everything impressed her, as if she hadn’t seen it a thousand times before. But had she? She’d passed everything by, without looking.

Sascha, who couldn’t stand to be the only person in the picture, made a silly face in every single one.

“Sascha, please,” Isi whined, catching the only sunbeam of the day as it fell on Sascha rolling his eyes.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Sascha said.

“Just – be here.”

Sascha sighed, and looked straight into the lens. Isi’s heart skipped a beat. She took the picture.

Once it got too dark for her camera to catch anything, and they got too tired of walking in the wind rushing at them from the water, they found a bench: far enough from the station that they felt that they were by themselves, unseen by anyone else, but not so far that they would have to use maps to find their way back. Isi was telling Sascha how to take care of the thuja when the text from Constantin came.

It had been so long since Isi last got a notification on their group chat that at first she didn’t know what it was. She showed it to Sascha. “Looks good,” Sascha said.

“But – your train.”

Isi watched Sascha weigh these two things against each other: asking Isi to bail on her friends, or waiting for the train alone.

“I’ll see if I can change my ticket.”

Isi couldn’t believe it. He had spent such a long time failing to introduce Sascha to his friends that now it was going to happen, it didn’t feel entirely real. He had always been afraid that once he got Sascha to come, Constantin would say something so cutting that afterwards Isi wouldn’t be able to look at Sascha the same. Isi knew, from the way Consti reacted whenever Isi blew them off to hang out with Sascha, that he thought that it was a little funny, their friendship. It might have been, compared to theirs. The others, too, acted as if Isi was going out of his way to keep a childhood friendship alive. ���So sweet,” Zoe had said. As if Isi was doing Sascha a favour. Sometimes, Isi believed that. Even when he remembered that he was hanging out with Sascha because he really fucking liked him, and that Conti was a jealous insecure asshole, he got defensive when others asked him about it. It had been easier to keep them and Sascha apart, their friendship confined to Isi’s room like a rare hothouse plant.

Now, his old fears barely registered. Isi woke up every morning wishing that she could stay hidden under her blanket where the outside world didn’t exist, where nobody saw her or had an opinion on her life, and she got up anyway, because the outside world had Sascha in it, and her family, and her friends. She was pushing through fear every second of her life. The prospect of her friends finally meeting Sascha barely made a difference.

When they arrived at Lou’s garage, nobody even cared that Isi wasn’t alone. Zoe said hi to Sascha, but then she went back to arranging the snacks and the drinks at the worktable, asking Kieu My if they definitely had enough, because if they hadn’t, Zoe could go to Lidl one more time before Lou came. Kieu My told her to calm down, herself busy tying balloons. Fatou offered to help – it would be easier, she didn’t have the nails – but Kieu My shooed her away, the pre-party preparation stress at critical levels. Fatou sat back down, keeping as much distance from Constantin as she could while they were both on the car’s hood, an absent-minded smile on her face. Isi had seen her smile like that when she was dealing with particularly difficult clients at the reptile centre. It turned warmer when she saw them. “Finally,” she said, getting off the car. She gave Isi a hug, and Sascha a longer one. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

By the time they had settled out in the back, the fire crackling in the can and the ground sticky with marshmallows that slid off their grilling sticks, Isi thought that he had figured it out. Zoe was there for Lou, and Kieu My was there for Zoe. Fatou was also there, and everybody was ignoring Constantin. He’d put his deck chair at an angle from the circle where the rest of them sat. The entire thing felt staged, like a scene they were forced to act out in a self-development workshop that the school organized after the one time Isi and Consti had shown up to school drunk and Consti vomited onto Ms Steinberg’s shoes. Everybody was speaking louder and laughing more than they naturally would, except for Lou, who never forced herself to be anything that she wasn’t.

“I don’t get it,” she said when they explained to her why they were there, and why they’d tied balloons to Rudi’s rear mirrors. “But I won’t say no to free alcohol.”

Isi had talked and laughed with everyone else, but when he’d lost the rhythm of it for a moment, he couldn’t find it again. He felt as if he’d put on a piece of clothing that used to be his favourite but didn’t fit anymore. He would look into the mirror and try to convince himself that it did – it was such a great piece – but he didn’t feel good in it. He couldn’t believe that he ever had.

“You good?” Isi turned to look at Lou, who’d asked him the question.

Isi shrugged. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt out of it at a party, but usually the feeling came much later in the night.

“Stop worrying so much,” she said, patting his knee. “You’ll get wrinkles.”

Sascha, who’d spent the previous ten minutes chatting to Fatou about music production in terms too sophisticated for Isi to follow, now turned to check that everything was okay. Isi shook their head.

“It’s nothing,” they told Sascha.

Isi was good. They didn’t want their old life back. But it was strange to see so clearly that it was gone.

They made an effort to listen to Sascha and Fatou, and stay interested, even when they couldn’t contribute anything. It was obvious that Sascha was into it. He had only one beer – Isi opened it for him, never missing a chance to show off her dexterity – but he was definitely more animated than usual. At some point, Isi realized that it wasn’t because Sascha was such a lightweight that he got tipsy off a single beer but because he was nervous. He’d been nervous to meet Isi’s friends, and now he was asking Fatou very specific questions about the equipment she and Ava used in their studio, because he didn’t want to be quiet at a party Isi had dragged him to. He was putting himself out there, because that was what a good – friend, boyfriend, whatever – did.

Isi didn’t know that they’d been staring until they heard Kieu My and Zoe laughing at them.

“I swear to God,” Kieu My said from across the fire, “I can see little hearts in your eyes.”

“Totally,” Zoe said. “It’s disgusting.”

“Shut up.” Isi glanced at Sascha. He looked as if he didn’t know how serious any of them was, but was going to play along anyway – as soon as he’d figure out the tune. Isi wanted to grab him, or hug him, or kiss him. They couldn’t do any of these things, so they only tightened their grasp on their grilling stick.

When Zoe and Kieu My went to get snacks, and it was just the three of them – and Constantin, in his spot behind Lou – Sascha asked Lou how it’d gone with her father: telling him that she would drop out of school and do a vocation training instead. Isi didn’t expect Sascha to ask Lou anything. It made him uneasy to realize that Sascha knew what to say, because he understood this about Lou, and Lou about him, better than Isi ever would. He didn’t know why Sascha told Lou what he had never told him. But he saw how relieved they were to be understood. He couldn’t be upset about it – he liked them both too much. He got up to see Rudi with them – and to see Sascha see Rudi – when Constantin stopped him.

Isi had been ignoring him the entire night. They’d looked away the moment they’d seen him in the garage, and hadn’t looked at him since. They’d known not to look too much to their right, or they’d see his pale shape looming behind Lou like the fucking Slenderman.

They didn’t know what he wanted. They didn’t want to know. They didn’t want to be thinking about him at all.

“Cool party,” they said, hoping that it would get them out of the conversation.

It didn’t.

Isi hated this. They’d noticed – obviously, they’d noticed – that Consti hadn’t been good. It was fucking sad to see, everybody pretending that he hadn’t been there, and him taking it because he saw no other way. Isi didn’t see it either. All he saw, when he looked at Constantin, was the Instagram story. He felt himself become smaller, hunching his shoulders, bracing. He heard his voice become weaker. He knew that it was happening, but he couldn’t make it stop, or make himself stronger. At the same time, when he looked at Consti, he saw his friend whom he’d put to bed drunk, woke up from a nightmare in the middle of the night and told him that it was nothing, it was only Isi, there was nothing to be afraid of. Isi hated that they still remembered that, and that they cared. They hated how weak Constantin made them feel. They hated that they let him. When Consti touched their arm, they recoiled.

Sascha got them the moment he came back outside. “I’m sorry,” he said, as everyone else gathered around Lou, now administering vodka shots. “I didn’t mean to leave the two of you alone.”

Isi had to swallow to loosen their throat up. “It’s okay,” they said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Isi took a deep breath, their shoulders rising against Sascha’s hands. “How much time do we have left?”

“I have no idea. I set up an alarm and I didn’t look at my phone after that.” Sascha paused. “Do you want to leave now?”

“No. I want a marshmallow on a hot dog.”

When they sat back around the fire, Isi watched Lou reach out and ruffle Constantin’s hair. They didn’t hear what she said but it made Constantin laugh – it sounded as if he was laughing at himself. Isi looked away, suddenly aware of themself as an intruder. Cheering Consti up was Lou’s job now. Isi didn’t know if they felt more guilty, or relieved.

Then Sascha elbowed them, and pointed to the marshmallow at the end of their grilling stick, dripping from the hot dog into the fire. “Want to take care of that?”

“Oh, shit.”

It was a mess. Isi had to slurp the melted marshmallow off the sausage, Sascha laughing hysterically next to them. Somebody was recording it.

“She’s beauty, she’s grace,” Zoe said, “she can’t fucking eat.”

“Stop bullying me,” Isi muttered, mouth full.

“You got a little,” Sascha said when Isi was done, and, because Isi didn’t do anything, brushed it off their chin with his thumb. Isi couldn’t help closing their eyes. “There.”

Sascha didn’t move away. Isi knew that they were both going through the same calculations: how much time had passed since they were at Sascha’s, how much time would pass before Sascha would be back, how far Hamburg was from Berlin.

When the alarm in Sascha’s phone rung and they both got up, the others booed them. “Sisters before misters,” Zoe cried, loud on vodka. But nobody seriously minded their going. Isi would see them all tomorrow, anyway, at the old theatre whose owner Ava had been bothering every day until he let them use the space for their New Year’s party. They had to clean it first, then decorate. Ava had been there every day since Christmas Eve, hard at work. it’s not like i’m missing out on family time, she’d said on the Abi Party group chat, to which Isi had been silently added the previous week.

“Take care,” Lou said. Isi didn’t know if they were going to see each before Friday night. Actually, he didn’t know if he was going to see much of her at all now that she got started with the training. It might have been the last time they hung out like this.

“You too,” he said.

The moment he and Sascha came out of the garage onto the empty street, it felt as if they were in a different world. Isi could still hear the music (Kieu My had very good speakers) and the laughter, but it all sounded as if it came from a vast distance, and not five metres behind them. It fell into the surrounding silence, which itself felt more present than the party had. Isi could feel her own heartbeat; she heard her breath and Sascha’s. For a moment, they were alone in the city.

Then Isi snapped herself out of it and went to unlock her scooter. Sascha stepped up behind, his arm around her waist, the other full of the thuja.

“It wasn’t so bad, was it,” she asked him, loud enough that he would hear her over the air rushing as they sped towards the U-bahn station.

“No,” Sascha said. They took a turn. “Lou is cool.”

“Told you.”

“You did,” Sascha agreed. “Many times.”

“Hey!” Isi turned around to glare at him.

Sascha laughed. “Eyes on the road!”

They made it to the station intact. The U-bahn was almost empty, so they put Dua in a seat of her own. Sascha took out his phone to make sure that the results of his test and his ticket loaded properly. The sight of it - the barcode, the hour the train would depart, the hour it’d arrive in Hamburg - made Isi’s heart sink. They knew that Sascha was leaving only for three days, but somehow it felt like it would be much longer than that. They looked over Sascha’s arm as he opened the chat with his dad. He’d sent him a message two hours ago to warn him that he’d be late. His dad replied with an Ok.

“He doesn’t like texting,” Sascha explained.

“Hmm.” Isi thought of what Sascha had said to Lou. “Is he going to be mad?”

“I don’t know.” Sascha leaned back and closed his eyes. “He wants me to come and work for him.”

“But…“ Sascha’s father was a manager at a transport company which, as far as Isi could tell, mostly involved spreadsheets and yelling at truck-drivers over the phone. “You’re not going to do that.”

Sascha shrugged. “He thinks what he wants to think. Anyway,” he said, sitting up. “It doesn’t matter. It’s fine.”

Isi didn’t know how to answer. “It matters,” they said at last. “If you’re worried about it.”

“I’m not, like…” Sascha started to say, but Isi just looked at him. “Okay,” he gave up. He seemed slightly annoyed, as if Isi had caught him out.

Isi let him get over it.

“We’ll facetime,” she said when the U-bahn reached the next stop. Sascha nodded.

The stop after that was the Central Railway Station.

The crowd was thinner than Isi would expect two days before New Year’s, but there were still lines in front of the stores. Sascha got curious looks from people who didn’t get why anyone would bring a large potted plant on a train. Nobody paid much attention to Isi: in a puffy coat and with a plain face-mask on, they barely looked like themself. They could be anyone. A boy with long hair. A boyish girl. Nobody cared. Everybody was just passing through.

When they came down to the platform, there were still three minutes left until Sascha’s train would arrive, and eight before it would depart.

“Text me when you get there,” Isi said.

“I will.”

“I have the Abi Party stuff early in the afternoon, but I’ll be free after that.”

“Yeah.” Isi could see Sascha smile behind the mask. “I know.”

A minute and a half. Isi felt like whatever they said, it’d feel like they didn’t use this time well enough. When they looked at the clock again, another ten seconds had passed. It was only three days, they told themself, and they would sleep through half of that.

When the train arrived, Sascha pulled them into a hug.

“Five minutes,” Isi said.

“I need to find my carriage.”

“Then four minutes.”

Sascha’s laughter tickled their ear. They twisted their hands into Sascha’s coat and wished that they could keep the feeling of having Sascha that close with them even after Sascha had gone.

“Okay,” Sascha said. “I need to go now.”

Isi let him. They followed Sascha to the train-door, and watched him until he disappeared behind the other passengers. They still stood there until the train left, and the whine of the machine against the tracks faded into nothing.

When Isi came outside, they saw that it’d been raining. The square in front of the station looked like a large mirror under the thin sheen of water. The lights of passing cars, diffused in the mist, fell on the wet stone and mixed there like paint. Isi wanted to take a picture of it, but on the screen of her phone it was only a blur. Looking up, Isi saw the blinking red lights on top of the construction cranes rising across the city. They put her phone back and pulled her mask down, breathing in the rain-scented air. The drizzle fell on her face. The people going in and from the station rushed past her, the umbrellas over their heads like a flock of very strange birds. Nobody looked at Isi. He stood there, face bare, and took it all in. She simply was, and the world was around her. Their heart was full.

#druck #saschisi #this chapter just wouldn't end.

[bealusith]

I made a small, but significant edit to the ending of Chapter 3. recently (in which Lou asks Isi if he has a crush).

I said in a reply to a comment that, something that emerged as one of the things Isi is anxious about, is not being taken seriously, and being treated like a child. a part of it is that I wanted to draw a connection between season 7 and season 6, where Isi was a bit of a clown; another part of it is that I wanted to suggest that Isi, as a nonbinary person, might have a sense that she doesn't have a comfortable grasp on her identity & sexuality that cis people his age seem to do. it’s more difficult for them to figure out what they want, which makes them feel that they are less mature. so, I wanted to lean into that. I think it would make it particularly difficult for Isi to admit that they had feelings for their childhood friend - as if they were still stuck at the stage of kindergarden marriages (this was a phrase I cut when writing the first draft, actually; I couldn’t figure out how to express it).

-

the original (in the post) ending reads:

“Do you – I don’t know,” Lou paused, at loss for words. “Have a little friendship crush on him, or something?”

“Um.” Isi couldn’t help it: when his eyes met Lou’s, he broke into  laughter. Lou shoved him, but she was laughing too. It was stupid. But –  he didn’t know. “Maybe?” He didn’t know what else to call it – the  warmth, the dizziness.

“Aw,” Lou said. She stroked his cheek lightly. “You’re blushing,” she said.

“I’m not.” The moment he’d said it, Isi felt his cheeks heat up. “It’s hot in here and I had vodka.”

Lou gave him a look. “You had a shot.”

“Whatever,” he huffed.

Lou shook her head, but she let him be. They began to settle for the  night: Lou got out of the car to lock the garage, and Isi wrapped  himself in the blanket until he felt he couldn’t move. He felt exhausted  but he wasn’t falling asleep. His heartbeat distracted him. He checked  his pulse and remembered the time Lou’d done it, and Isi’d almost kissed  her. He hadn’t known then why his heart had been beating so fast, and  he didn’t know now. He had the sense that he’d let out a secret, but he  hadn’t said anything. A little crush was nothing, like a look was  nothing. A trick of light – the sense of vertigo when a step in the  stairs wasn’t where Isi expected it. It was nothing but a momentary  confusion.

-

the revision (highlighted):

“Do you – I don’t know,” Lou paused, at loss for words. “Have a little friendship crush on him, or something?”

“Um.” Isi couldn’t help it: when his eyes met Lou’s, he broke into laughter. Lou shoved him, but she was laughing too. A little friendship crush. It sounded so childish, as if he couldn't tell the difference between being a little touchy with a friend, and the real thing. But – he didn’t know what else to call it – the warmth, the dizziness.

“Aw,” Lou said. She touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “You’re blushing,” she said.

“I’m not.” The moment he’d said it, Isi felt his cheeks heat up. “It’s hot in here and I had vodka.”

Lou gave him a look. “You had a shot.”

“Whatever,” he huffed.

Lou shook her head, but she let him be. They began to settle for the night: Lou got out of the car to lock the garage, and Isi wrapped himself in the blanket until he felt that he couldn’t move. He was exhausted, but he wasn’t falling asleep. His heartbeat distracted him. He checked his pulse and remembered the time Lou had done it, and Isi had almost kissed her. He hadn’t known then why his heart was beating so fast, and he didn’t know now. He had the sense that he’d let out an embarrassing secret, but he hadn’t said anything. A little crush was nothing, like a look was nothing. A trick of light – the sense of vertigo when a step in the stairs wasn’t where Isi expected it. A wave of childhood nostalgia, mounting before it breaks.

[bealusith]

hit 2,000 words on the new update, it’s still far from done...

#i HOPE i can get it done for tomorrow night but it just keeps going...

[bealusith]

@nussmixmussnix

I appreciate it and love how you give your writing so much depth 💜 S7 made everyone seem so flat as characters sometimes, even though there was so much set up and many new things were merely touched upon... I love how you do research beforehand, connect the loose strings and also include different time layers of the characters‘ lives 💙 I read somewhere that when entering the Cem house, you become a genderless soul. I didn’t watch the documentary above yet, but maybe they mention it, too? 

Thank you, this is very kind!

I feel obliged to say that I was being a little facetious; I don’t seriously think that the writers didn’t do any research, but I have a habit of making fun of them, much like the rest of the fandom. All I did was read several websites, one and a half academic articles, watch this documentary, and several shorter clips on yt. I can’t take that much credit.

What you’re saying reminds me of this part from a website of the British Alevi Federation: “Alevis call each other ‘Can’ (soul), which is a gender-neutral name. As a result of this understanding, the position of women in Alevism is equal to that of men.“ The documentary did not mention this!

It was my impression, watching and reading, that even if women and men are equal, and the dance is an expression of the individual to God, or the universe, the individuals participate as men and women. There is a suggestion of harmony, or balance, a combination of the opposites. But I don’t know. It is much easier to write about a specific person’s specific experiences, which do not have to be representative of an entire faith, than it is to speak as a random person on the Internet about this. I feel like I reached the limit of what I could say in the fic.

As far as the writing is concerned, I wanted to avoid suggesting that becoming more involved in the community would solve all Isi’s problems, because that seemed too easy. On the other hand, I didn’t want to suggest that the solution would be to reject it as too traditional and oppressive in contrast with the more progressive and liberal German society. I wanted to depict the community as important to Isi, but not less complicated than other parts of their life. It does come off as a little idyllic, because Isi’s memories of it are childhood memories.

re: including different time layers of characters’ lives - it’s not a very conscious choice; I do it because I came up with a lot of details I don’t get to use, and because it allows the scenes to breathe a little, it provides space between lines of dialogue. I’m happy that it adds to the story instead of distracting from it!

#nussmixmussnix #replies

[bealusith]

spinning like mercury

second-to-last in the series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi is early to get Sascha from work.

[Dec. 28] Tuesday 14:42

On Tuesday, Sascha had work, and Isi had their last dance practice. They’d been barely awake when Sascha’d been leaving: when their alarm had rung, they’d shuffled out of their apartment in slippers and their robe, the eye-mask pulled over their hair to keep it in place. Sascha laughed at them, kissed them on the corner of their mouth when, very briefly, they stopped yawning, and ran downstairs. When Isi had come back to his room, they fell asleep for another two hours.

The dance practice was in the afternoon. Isi had been slightly apprehensive arriving at the sports hall. Even though half of the the dance team had reached out to him over the holidays to tell him how happy they were for him, after four days spent exclusively in Sascha’s and their families’ company, Isi felt like one of those wild children who got lost in the savannah and had to be reintegrated into the human society after being raised by the giraffes. He had always wondered if they wouldn’t be better off, or at least happier, left alone, running around naked and munching on grass all day long.

When Kieu My saw him – she did not run; it was Kieu My, after all – but she came up to him and gave him a tight hug. Isi didn’t know what to do, not when everyone else was there pretending that this was normal, but it was only a while before Kieu My stepped away from him and shifted back into the team leader mode, clapping her hands and telling everyone to get off their asses, because this time, they were going to get it right.

The “it” was unnervingly non-specific. They had agreed on a song, learned the basic moves, and hoped they wouldn’t get in each other’s way. Kieu My had told them to relax, and paused the music every time one of them slouched, or put their foot down wrong. But after weeks of crashing into each other, Isi slipping when he tried to do the pirouette-turn Kieu My was obsessed with, and Fatou elbowing whoever was closest to her, they had found a fluidity they could rely on. Isi did the turn, Fatou didn’t injure anyone, and Ava let loose – as much as she knew how. There was a single moment where they had been perfect, moving with the music and with each other, one, huge, and alive. They lost it immediately, but Isi had the sense of it when it’d happened. It felt almost religious, and made the stumble before and after worth it.

It’d reminded Isi of semah. He remembered coming into the cemevi as a child, the teacher guiding him into the circle with other children, and telling him to whirl. Open your hand, she’d said, now let it return to your heart. Everything you need is there. With this movement you fly off, like a crane. With this movement you spin like a planet revolving around the Sun. At ten years old, the thing Isi wanted to know the most was: which planet? Mars, Venus, Mercury? He knew that it couldn’t have been Earth, because Earth was too boring, but every other planet, he was sure, had its own particular way of spinning and he needed to know which it was going to be. He remembered that, when they all had gone to dance at the culture centre, he’d been jealous of the girls’ costumes. They wore long bright coats with tassels and embroidered headscarves, tied at the back, which somehow made them look older. All Isi got was an all-black ensemble. Long after the show, he’d forced Sascha and Ava to watch him do the Mercury spin at the recess. He knew that he wasn’t supposed to – it was secret – but he was too excited not to. The dance felt so good, it made Isi feel like he was more of himself and more with the others than anything else in the world. Then, one time when he was showing Ava and Sascha how to spin, the group of boys that always harassed the three of them, started laughing, and Isi realized that without the accompaniment of music and other dancers, the movement wasn’t beautiful at all. Isi was just being weird. They had grown out of this embarrassment, but they didn’t know what place in the cemevi they would have now. They remembered, too, that semah was a dance of a man and a woman to celebrate the universe. They would be much more comfortable dancing as a planet or a bird.

She had said some of it to Kieu My after the practice, when they were all sitting and lying down on the floor, too tired to move. “I remember this,” Ava said, surprising them both. “I haven’t thought about it in years.” Neither had Isi. He’d tried to convince Ava and Sascha to join him, but they never had. He was glad that he could dance with Ava now. They had never come close, not even when the music was playing, but they were both a part of it. Isi thought that it was nice. They hoped that it was nice for Ava, too.

When everyone else had started to move, and Isi was about to get up from the floor himself, Ava stopped him. They waited for everyone else to leave.

“I’m glad that it worked out between you and Sascha,” Ava said once they were alone. It sounded like she had said it to herself at least a dozen times before, determined to get the tone right: sincere, but not too warm.

“Me too,” Isi said.

She nodded. She got up first and gave Isi a hand, then went ahead to the girls’ locker room, their conversation over.

Isi was thinking about all this, chewing mint gum until it lost all its flavour, until she realized that she’d arrived at Sascha’s workshop. She checked her phone. There was still long eighteen minutes left. The plan was to fill any spare time she had with bubble tea, but she’d been so deep in thought that she’d forgotten all about it, and now she was here.

They had never been inside, so it took them a while to find the door. They crossed the store (empty, save for an old man snoring despite the sounds of a power saw coming from behind the wall) and went into the back. It was obvious that they shouldn’t be there, but the place had a good aura that set them at ease. It felt more like a home than a workplace. The furniture was old and mismatched, and there were faded trade magazines everywhere, covered with coffee rings. It was striking how real it all was: the workshop, Sascha’s job, his life there. Isi used to feel sorry for him, stuck in a comprehensive while Isi had gone to a gymnasium. But then they realized that somewhere along the way, Sascha had become his own person, while Isi had still been everybody else’s. Sascha knew what he was good at, and knew how to make it his life. Meanwhile, Isi had thought that he’d write a good Abi, get a good degree and a good job, whatever it was – doing business in an office, something like that. But now they couldn’t tell where they’d got the idea from. They could have a place like this, if they found something real they were good at. They could be a dancer, if they tried. It would probably be really hard, but it could be fun.

When they got to the workshop (disposing of the chewing gum on their way), Sascha was still sawing, noise-cancelling headphones on. Isi watched him for a moment – they had not, they realized, paid sufficient attention to Sascha’s back before – but very quickly it wasn’t enough, and Isi came closer, expecting Sascha to sense that they were there. It was only when Sascha turned around that it occurred to Isi that surprising him while he was holding a power saw might not have been the best idea.

“Fuck,” Sascha said, and there was a moment where Isi wasn’t sure that he didn’t cut his finger off, but then the noise was gone, and Sascha’s hands – Isi held them up to see if there was no damage – were whole.

“Are you okay,” they still asked. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Sascha replied, looking slightly ill. “You just scared me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, just…” Sascha laughed weakly. “Don’t do that again? Please?”

“I won’t. I didn’t think.”

“I guess I could’ve told you not to come inside.”

“Still.”

“Why are we arguing about this,” Sascha asked, sounding more like himself. Isi shrugged. They realized that they were still holding Sascha’s hands, so they let them go, and let Sascha get ready to leave.

“How did you even get in anyway,” Sascha asked.

“The guy in the front was asleep.”

Sascha sighed. “I keep saying that he’s napping half of the time we’re here, but he never admits to it.”

When they were passing him by on their way out, he said a very loud goodbye and slammed the door behind him.

Isi giggled.

“What,” Sascha said.

“You’re being rude,” Isi explained, delighted that this was the case.

“He won’t even notice.” Isi didn’t doubt that, but that didn’t change anything. “Let’s get the cart, yeah?”

Isi talked Sascha into letting her drive. She always wanted to try, and she wanted Sascha to rest. He still turned around every five minutes to check that everything was alright, but eventually he realized that Isi wasn’t going to drive them into a wall anytime soon, and settled down.

With an open view of the street, Isi noticed every time others looked in their direction, not sure what to make of them, and of Isi themself. They saw Sascha in the cart, and they looked at Isi accordingly before they picked an explanation they considered most likely. Were they friends? Boyfriend and girlfriend? Both. More. Two people and a cart.

“Do you remember the way I used to dance all the time at school,” Isi asked, “pretending that I was a bird and so on?”

“Sure,” Sascha said. “You were very cute.”

“Very weird.”

Sascha didn’t say anything for a moment. “I always thought – you know, when you were dancing, that you were able to let go of everything and be completely yourself. And not care what other people think. I can’t do that, so… I don’t know. I wish that I could, and I like watching it when you do.”

Isi stopped the cart. When Sascha looked up to see what was going on, they held his gaze and then, mindless of the passers-by, leaned down to kiss him.

“I like it when you watch me,” they said afterwards.

“Well,” Sascha smiled. “That’s a nice coincidence.”

Isi would punch him if they weren’t worried about the cart.

--

END NOTES:

I wasn't planning to take on Isi's identity as a member of the Alevi community, but then I watched a documentary (Heavenly Journeys - Insights into Alevi Ritual Dance - 30 min on YouTube for free, very accessible, very interesting, would recommend) & what they said about the dance resonated so much with what this season was trying to do, and with what I am trying to do here... I essentially lifted as much as I could from the documentary & the few articles I've found in open access. I hope I didn't distort it too much in the process.

#druck #saschisi #i keep writing two chapters & pretending that they are one chapter.

[bealusith]

yes, I will be watching a 30 minutes long documentary on the religious significance of dance in a German Alevi community...

#because unlike druck writers I do take my research seriously 😑

[bealusith]

older sibling of the year

thirteenth in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi gives her little brother a lot to think about.

[Dec. 27] Monday 16:27

The day after Christmas, Sascha was meeting his friends from comprehensive. Sascha told Isi that they had been planning it for months: their schedules at various trade schools and workshops (and one community theatre) never aligned, and December 27th was the first day since August that worked for all of them. Sascha couldn’t not go. “You can always come with,” he’d said – but Isi could not. She had been with her family since the Christmas Eve, and she was not ready to step back into the world just yet. Everything with her, and with Sascha, was still very new. Isi didn’t know how to work other people into it. She didn’t go.

Her family, at least, was happy to have her back. The previous day, after they’d had lunch with their families, Isi and Sascha had gone out together with Sascha’s mom to look for a gift for his dad at the Christmas market in the Old Town, and hadn’t come back until late. Sascha’s mom was looking for the gift, while Isi and Sascha were looking for the stands which offered tiny cups of Swiss hot chocolate to taste. Isi held the chocolate in her mouth, eyes closed, luxuriating in the texture, then noticed Sascha watching her do it and spent the rest of the day unable to think about anything else. She’d gone upstairs after dinner and stayed the night. When she finally came home, her father suggested, half-joking, that they establish a schedule that would keep Isi with her family for at least half of the Christmas break. “I’m sorry,” Isi’d said. “It’s okay,” her father said, ruffling her hair. It used to be easier before Isi had his growth spurt. “But we want to see you, too.”

So: Isi didn’t go to meet Sascha’s friends, and instead of catching up on the lost sleep, they asked Umut if he wanted to go the cinema with them. Umut did. Isi was looking up the times the newest Spiderman was playing when Umut, curled up on the opposite end of the sofa, reached out to show Isi his phone.

It was Instagram: Isi’s post form the Rainbow Night. The picture of them with the name-tag.

“Abi, what does it mean?”

Isi swallowed. They examined Umut’s expression. He didn’t look upset, or grossed out. Only confused.

They didn’t know how to explain. They had been reading through the leaflets at the centre, and later, looking at the pictures they’d taken of them, but they’d become overwhelmed very quickly and put it out of their mind. They knew when things felt good, and when they didn’t. They didn’t reflect on how, or why. Their friends, and Sascha, got it without Isi explaining. It saved Isi from putting it into words. But they knew that they needed to words to explain it to Umut. They couldn’t simply send Umut a link to a website. He was their little brother. They have never not explained anything when he’d asked.

“Um. It means that…” Every explanation Isi had read started the same way. “Some people know that they are a man, or a woman, and that feels good for them. But for some people it doesn’t work like that. For me – I am – a man, but it’s not – the only thing that I am. I am… what I am, I am me, and sometimes that is man, but when it’s not – it’s not because I am bad at being a man, but because I’m something else.” When they were done with this little speech, it felt as if they had run a marathon.

They watched Umut process it. He looked as if he was faced with a math problem he didn’t know how to solve.

“I didn’t know you can do that,” he said eventually.

Isi hadn’t either, until last Friday, so there wasn’t much they could say, other than: “Well, why not?”

Umut accepted this, and went back to his phone. Isi was waiting for her heartbeat to slow down. Did she do it right? Was that enough? Did Umut understand? Was it okay? It seemed okay. When she calmed down, she selected a screening and bought their tickets.

They went to a screening with German dubbing because Umut always complained when he had to read the subtitles. Their parents said that subtitles wouldn’t be a problem if he spent less time on his phone and more reading books but Isi had never been one to reform Umut’s habits, so she let him have his way with this as she did with everything else – even if it was weird to hear Zendaya and Tom Holland speak stiff German, and made it even more difficult for Isi to focus the plot. It was either too complicated for them to get, or simply stupid, they didn’t know which. All they knew was that the movie bored them to death and they’d check their phone every ten minutes if Umut wasn’t sitting next to them, eyes shining with excitement.

Isi even let Umut talk her into getting MacDonald’s afterwards, which Isi agreed to only after Umut promised not to tell mom anything. As she took her place in line, waiting to pick up Umut’s chicken wings (he was too grown-up for Happy Meals), Isi got a text from Sascha.

hi habibi

Before she had a chance to reply, Sascha texted her again.

where are you, a smiling emoji.

Isi took a picture of the line.

waiting in line for little mister’s chicken wings

aw

eldest sibling of the year

idk

he asked about the pronouns thing today

i tried to explain but

it’s kind of a lot to put on a 13 yrs old

Isi looked at the message and almost hit themself.

it’s a lot to put on u!!!

sorry

no don’t be sorry

it’s ok

i want to be there for you

whatever you need.

“Excuse me? M’a- Sir?”

Isi looked up and realized they were at the beginning of the line now. The cashier had to explain to them that they were supposed to read the number of their order on the receipt. Isi briefly forgot how numbers and reading worked, but they eventually managed to secure a box of chicken wings.

When he put the food in front of Umut and took a seat across the table, Isi took out his phone again. Sascha hadn’t sent anything else.

sorry, Isi texted him. i had to pay

yeah

i thought it was something like that

Isi stared at his phone. It was impossible to put what he wanted to say to Sascha into text.

r u back already?

no

Another smiling emoji.

Isi frowned. He’d begun to type his reply when Umut, spitting deep-fried breadcrumbs, yelled: “Sascha!”

Isi turned around. Sascha was walking towards them, face-mask still on, but smile unmistakable on his face.

“Hi.” He slid into the booth next to Isi. “I was in the area,” he said, as if that explained everything. “How was the movie?”

While Umut launched into a detailed, if a little chaotic, narration of the entire plot of the two-and-a-half-hours long movie, Isi gradually adjusted to the fact of Sascha’s presence. She moved closer to him, until their knees bumped under the table. Sascha took her hand. His was freezing cold – at first, then it was the same as Isi’s. When Umut had at last told Sascha what happened to all the Spidermen – long after he’d finished his wings – and went to the bathroom to wash his hands, Sascha turned to Isi.

Sascha had pulled his mask off, but Isi wasn’t going to kiss him in the middle of a crowded MacDonald’s, not after she had a coke and nachos with cheesy sauce less than an hour ago.

“My friends want to meet you,” Sascha said.

“They know who I am?”

Sascha gave him a look.

“They asked what’s going on in my life.”

“Well…”

Surely there were many different exciting things going on in Sascha’s life, even if at the moment, Isi couldn’t think of a single one.

“I meant it, you know,” Sascha said after a while.

“What,” Isi asked. They’d been thinking about how much they wished that they had mint chewing gum, the kind that made their mouth feel as if it had been scorched.

“I do want to be there for you.”

“Oh.”

This was it: Isi had been so careful to stay on his tightrope, and not fall into the bottomless pool he’d been carrying inside him, but now Sascha came and pushed him. Isi was gone, and he would’ve stayed gone if Umut didn’t choose this exact moment to return from the bathroom.

“It’s funny,” he said, getting back inside the booth. “When you’re sitting like that, it looks like you’re kissing.” He said it like it was funny because: ew, kissing. His older sibling, too!

“Um,” Isi said.

She looked at Sascha but, this once, it looked as if Sascha had no clue what to do, either.

“We are,” Isi said. “I mean – we do?”

Umut’s eyes widened.

“But – you’re not, like –“

“We are.”

When nobody else said anything, Sascha said: “I hope this is OK with you.”

“Sure,” Umut said weakly.

It was beginning to become comical, rather than the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened in Isi’s life.

Afterwards, Umut didn’t make eye contact with either of them, in the kaufhaus or on the bus afterwards, and when they got out on their street, he walked a few steps ahead of them.

“Do you think he’s upset,” Isi whispered to Sascha.

“No,” Sascha replied. “I think,” he seemed not to know how to say it, “He wants to – give us privacy?”

“God.”

“It’s kind of sweet.”

At first, Isi struggled see it that way, but when she considered it, she thought that Sascha was probably right. It was Umut being a thirteen-years old, and not Isi traumatizing him for the rest of his life with her – everything. She let herself relax, properly.

“And you,” they asked, “are you OK with this?”

“Umut knowing?”

“Yeah.”

Sascha shrugged. “Sure. I mean, it is a little mortifying, but at least we don’t have to do the whole meet the family thing.”

Isi snorted. “Right.”

They moved closer to Sascha and took his arm. If Umut turned around and saw them, he’d have to cope.

#druck #saschisi #the first chapter to really feature umut! #i guess i didn't feel the need to write about him because the show mostly did a good job with their relationship. #but they could do more! #also this is the longest chapter to date... almost twice the regular length. & i did cut 200 words i'm saving for the next one! #anyway. enjoy. etc.

[bealusith]

& yes I did watch a six-minutes long tutorial on how to make coffee in cezve today.

[bealusith]

a special occasion

twelfth in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi serves breakfast.

[Dec. 26] Sunday 09:51

Sascha was still asleep when Isi woke up. Isi took note of everything: the sight of Sascha’s slightly flushed face, smushed into Isi’s pillow, the weight of his arm thrown over Isi’s side, the warmth of his shin where it touched Isi’s. Isi felt nostalgic, as if it had all already passed, because they knew that it would – now that they woke up, it was day and it would take them further and further from this moment. Isi wished that they could stay inside it forever, or else, carry it with them. They willed themselves to absorb it so they could hold it like a jar holds honey. But then their stomach became so tight with hunger that they had to stop watching Sascha sleep and get out of bed.

Standing up, Isi saw everything he’d left behind last night, too dazed to care. His trousers, on the one side of the bed, and Sascha’s, on the other. The crumpled paper towels on the floor. The cotton pads by the mirror where he’d sat last night, falling asleep, and wiping off his eyeliner, distracted by the reflection of Sascha, watching him from his bed. Isi had almost taken his eye out. Now, he collected the used cotton pads, and put the makeup remover back into the drawer of his toilet stands. He carefully folded his and Sascha’s clothes, and put them on the chair, on top of Sascha’s shirt. The paper towels he’d kicked under his bed. He would deal with it later. He couldn’t imagine throwing them out anywhere his parents could see him.

They were at the table, each with a newspaper, taking a sip of coffee when they remembered. Isi leaned down to wrap his arms around his mother. She touched his hand, and turned the page.

“Is Umut up?”

“No,” she said.

“Should I get him?”

“No, let him sleep.”

“Okay.”

Isi straightened, and put his hand on her arm to let her know that he was going. His father looked up from his newspaper.

“Has Sascha already left?”

“No,” Isi said evenly. “I’m getting us breakfast.”

“No eating in bed,” his mother said.

“Never.”

When her parents didn’t say anything else, Isi went into the kitchen. First priority: food. She took a bite of the flatbread her father had baked yesterday to see if it hadn’t gone completely dry and, happy to discover that it had not, stacked more torn-off pieces on a clean plate she’d taken from the drainer. Then: stuffed wine-leafs from the fridge, the bar of pistachio nuts in honey, two slices of halva. Coffee. Isi took out the cezve and filled it with sugar and the grounded coffee she and Umut had got from the store the previous Monday, the specific brand her mother had requested. Isi had to get a stool from the hallway to reach the cabinet where her mother kept the cups Isi wanted: thin porcelain, with a dark blue rim. She measured the water and began to brew the coffee. When it was ready, she neatly divided the foam between the cups and delicately poured the liquid, coffee trickling over the edge and slipping under the foam. After she arranged everything on a tray, she saw that it was, quite possibly, the most aesthetically pleasing meal she had ever prepared. She would take a picture, but she didn’t have her phone, and she didn’t remember where she had last put it.

Their mother raised her eyebrows when she saw them coming out of the kitchen with the tray, absurdly slow, as to not disturb the foam on the top of coffee.

“Is this my mother’s porcelain,” she asked.

Isi nodded.

“I see.”

Isi passed their parents by, pretending not to notice the looks they gave them, and each other.

They came up to their door and saw that they hadn’t had the foresight to leave it open. There was nowhere for Isi to set the tray down, unless they went back into the kitchen.

“Sascha,” they called. “Sascha, help.”

A groan. The floorboards, creaking.

“What,” Sascha said, opening the door, eyes still mostly closed and hair poking in all directions. Isi would kiss him if they didn’t have four plates in their hands.

“Breakfast,” they said.

They did have it in bed. Isi asked Sascha to put the coffee cups on the night stand and then she set the tray down on her duvet, smoothed to approximate a flat surface (she would have to change the bedsheets, anyway). She sat down, cross-legged, and stuffed a slice of halva into her mouth.

“Coffee,” she said.

Sascha came to and sat across Isi. He passed them their coffee cup and took his. Isi watched him take a careful sip. They added more sugar than usual because they knew Sascha wasn’t used to it without.

“Is it good?”

“Yes.” Sascha turned the cup in his hands. “I don’t think I know these,” he said.

“Oh, we only take them out for special occasions.”

Sascha looked at Isi with a sudden intent.

“May I?” he asked, opening his hand. Isi gave him their cup. Sascha leaned back and, very gently, put both coffees back on Isi’s night stand. When he had done that, he reached across and slowly pulled Isi into a kiss.

“They are very nice,” he said afterwards.

“I didn’t know you had such a thing for porcelain,” Isi answered, still confused.

Sascha only laughed at him, but Isi didn’t mind.

#druck #saschisi #the previous chapter taking 4 days to write vs this taking approximately 90 min of actual typing. #anyway. disgustingly sweet fluff & the only development is happening from sascha's point of view but. there should've been something!

[bealusith]

new habits

eleventh in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi has no filter.

[Dec. 25] Saturday 10:00

Isi woke up with their phone ringing in their hand. It took them a moment to realize what it was, and what they were supposed to do with it. When they looked at the screen, they saw that it was 10 AM, exactly, and that Sascha was calling them. Isi had made him promise that he’d wake her up. She melted seeing his name on the screen, remembering it and realizing that it’d been real.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Sascha said back.

Last night, they’d stopped in front of Isi’s door, and stood there, waiting. Isi knew what would happen next, but he wasn’t sure how, and who would make the first move. He had walked home leaning against Sascha and falling asleep, but in that moment, he was fully alert, feeling as if he’d downed three cans of energy drinks. He didn’t know if he was still thinking, or if his body was running on pure directionless electricity. When Sascha’d kissed him, he grabbed his coat to pull him closer until he walked backwards into the door. Now, he had a bruise where the door-handle had been.

“How are you feeling,” Sascha asked.

Isi had to recall the fact of human language. “Good,” they said. “You?”

“Good.”

When neither of them spoke, Isi heard static, as if Sascha had been on a windy street. They couldn’t imagine it: Sascha, outside, Sascha getting up and going out while Isi was still asleep, like it was nothing.

“Where are you?”

"We’re looking for a Christmas tree,” Sascha said. “I thought it’d be only me and my mom, but it’s more like half of the city.” Isi didn’t say anything, calculating how much further Sascha was from where Isi’d expected him to be. “What kind should we get?" Sascha asked.

"What?”

"The tree."

"Oh." Isi considered it. "Pine."

"Then pine it is,” Sascha said. “I’ll have to ask.”

“Now?”

“Well,” Sascha laughed, “yes?”

“Okay,” Isi said, unhappy.

Neither of them was hanging up.

“We’ll be there at seven,” Sascha said.

“I know,” Isi sighed, then repeated, more brightly, “I know.” They didn’t want to hang up, but they didn’t to make Sascha feel bad for having to, either. “See you at seven,” they said.

“See you,” Sascha said back.

The call ended.

Phone still in their hand, Isi rolled onto their back and stared at empty expanse of their ceiling. When they’d come home last night, they fell asleep as soon as they hit the mattress. But even then, there was a moment when they’d been afraid of what would happen next. They’d made Sascha promise that he would call, but what if he wouldn’t? What if overnight, everything changed - again? Sascha did call, but now that he’d hung up, Isi wondered.

Last night, when it’d first occurred to her that they would have to stop – she would have to go to hers, and Sascha to his, and they wouldn’t be in the same room until the following evening – when this occurred to her, she’d asked him if he would stay. Sascha drew back slightly and said that he didn’t know if that would work. Isi hadn’t meant – but once Sascha mentioned it, it was impossible to make it mean anything else. Isi dropped her head on Sascha’s arm, too embarrassed to look at him. She’d felt Sascha letting out a small disbelieving laughter, the air moving by their ear.

Had it been too much? Were they? Sascha’d said no, but would he always?

When Isi’d asked Sascha to call to wake him up before – long before, after their first lockdown together – he didn’t always pick up. Instead, he let the phone buzz, once, twice, again, until noon, when his mother would drag him out of bed anyway. When Sascha asked why Isi wanted him to call if he wasn’t going to pick up anyway, Isi shrugged. He didn’t have a good answer. It was better than the alarm in his phone – and sometimes, he did answer, and told Sascha what’d gone on the previous night, what he wore, what he drank, what Consti broke in a stranger’s house. When he was telling it to Sascha, he felt that it’d happened to someone else – as if he’d been only watching himself, two metres from his body.

It was nothing like this now. Isi knew that it’d been them stopping last night in front of their door, fumbling for their key and hesitating when they’d found it. It’d been him, standing there and waiting. It was her, waiting now. They were whole when they were with Sascha. They didn’t hide anything, or hold anything back. They wouldn’t know how, even if they wanted to. But it meant that no piece of them was left safe. Before, if anything’d gone wrong, Isi knew that it  wouldn’t be about him – not all of him, not really. They couldn’t say it now. There was no distance separating her from her body, no bubble wrap. There was no separation whatsoever. It was incredible and terrifying.

Her phone buzzed.

Sascha had sent her a picture of a pine tree resting in a pot next to his cart.

will it fit, Isi wrote.

sure it will, came the reply.

Isi noticed that she’d received other messages over the night. A good work from Lou. did it go ok?! and, hours later, cool name-tag! from Finn. OH MY GOD from Kieu My and three voice notes, together almost fifteen minutes. When Isi had played them all (and almost cried listening to Kieu My saying how important these spaces were for people like them – like them, because it was them, and Isi wasn’t alone) and replied, he opened Instagram. Browsing the gallery, Isi realized that half of his pictures from last night was of various leaflets. He picked a picture Sascha took of him, a picture David took of Sascha and her together and, at the very end, the pictures they’d posted on their story. The name-tag, up close, and the selfie. They didn’t give themself the time to hesitate.

She’d watched her friends like the post. Sascha's comment: a purple heart. Ten minutes later: a notification that Ava liked it. Isi put away their phone and closed their eyes. They put their hand over their heart. It was racing, but they weren’t afraid. Or, afraid wasn’t all they were. They remembered what Lou had said: it was the feeling of freedom.

#druck #saschisi #also the one in which i remember how to write. #and the one in which the summary is more ~significant than the title. #i would call this no filter if i didn't use this exact structure the last time.

[bealusith]

no preconception

tenth (!) in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi and Sascha take a night bus home.

[Dec. 25] Saturday 02:23

They were waiting for the night bus. Isi didn’t know when it was supposed to come. When Sascha sat down after examining the timetable, Isi simply sat down next to him and contorted himself until it was physically possible for him to rest his head against Sascha’s arm. But why himself? It was the first word that came to mind. Herself, themself. None of these was more correct than the other. Isi couldn’t get over it: this was allowed. He, she, they, everything was allowed.

They yawned. “I had so much fun.”

“I saw,” Sascha said, smug.

They’d barely had any time together: Sascha at the DJ booth, Isi on the dancefloor, too self-conscious to come over more than two or three times, with nothing much to say but ask Sascha if he was getting a break anytime soon. When Sascha had his half hour off, he showed Isi around, introducing her to every person they met, until everyone at the party knew that their DJ had a very quiet, very star-struck friend. Strangers told Isi that she was looking great, but it felt as if they wanted to tell her that they saw what she was doing, and that it was good. Isi had thought that it was only Lou who saw it. Before Lou, nobody else got him. He did look great, and because he did, others didn’t have to get it. They wanted to have whatever he had, without knowing what it was. As the night went on, Isi realized that she might have been less unknowable than she had imagined. Every person in the room had a name-tag like hers, but whatever they had written on it, it meant a different thing to everyone. Everyone had a secret they didn’t know how to tell. But everyone in the room knew that there was a secret to be known, not in words, but in keeping others company.

After Sascha’s break was over, he and Isi didn’t talk until the very last hour of the night, when the remaining dozen people were mostly sitting on the floor, chatting and playing seventies disco from their phones. Somehow, everybody knew every song. Almost all of them were students, with common gossip, common course readings and Twitter threads. A few of them, when they noticed Isi listening in, made an effort to include her, but she didn’t get a large part of their rambling explanations, interrupted by unpredictable tangents, singing, drinking, and laughter when another person in the group said something too funny to ignore. Isi felt like a new arrival in a foreign country, with nothing but hearsay and Google Translator to guide them. They’d never considered going to a group like that, not before Sascha had mentioned it. It felt too earnest. Just because Isi got a few dresses on the Internet, it didn’t mean that he wanted to sit in a circle, hold hands with strangers and sing kumbaya. Consti would never let him live it down, which was a reason enough to never go. By the time Sascha’d joined, Isi felt that it was too late. He couldn’t go to his first meeting at almost eighteen and tell everyone that he had no idea who he was. He’d die of embarrassment. Now, safe on the couch next to Sascha, listening to the conversation loosely unfolding around them, Isi was surprised by the distance they saw extending between themself, and the person they were remembering.

They had to clean up before they left. Sascha was cleaning up with others – unplugging and rolling the cables, careful with the tiny lightbulbs – while Isi stood with empty hands, asking if there was anything she should do, or take, or carry somewhere, or, or, or. Sascha told him that he was a guest. “But I’m not,” they’d said. A guest wasn’t what they wanted to be. “Okay,” Sascha replied, directing them back towards the couch. “But you are falling asleep.” Isi wanted to help. “I know,” Sascha said. “I will ask you to do everything next time. Promise.” Isi would mind being made fun of so blatantly if Sascha wasn’t also looking at them as if he still couldn’t believe that they’d came and been there with Sascha for the last four hours. Isi knew how it felt: when she took it all in, she was so glad she couldn’t speak. They both paused, the cable half-rolled in Sascha’s hands. With every passing second, Isi discovered that he could be happier than he believed possible a second earlier. It was almost too much. Isi knew, waiting at the bus stop with her head against Sascha’s arm, that the feeling was still there, like a bottomless pool which she was crossing on a tightrope. If she didn’t focus, she’d slip and fall in.

“Isi.” Sascha moved, jolting Isi out of it. “Isi, the bus.”

After the generous darkness of the deserted streets, getting on the glaringly bright bus was as unpleasant as German border control. A group of drunk tourists hooted when Isi and Sascha boarded, as if the fact that they were all on a bus together at two in the morning made them natural friends. Isi and Sascha passed the party-goers, the unconscious drunks, and the single miserable woman dressed for work. They sat right next to the last door.

Isi stuffed his hands inside his pockets and took out the name-tag. She turned it around in her fingers. Sascha shifted in the seat next to her when he’d noticed. Isi considered the men and women on the bus, the men with the women, and the men together, and looked back at the piece of paper in her hands. The glitter was getting on her fingers.

“Do you mind?” They weren’t looking at Sascha.

“What do you mean?”

“If it’s not just for tonight.”

Isi stopped playing with the card and looked at it, properly. It had felt good when he’d done it, and when Sascha had seen it. It felt as if Isi had finally figured out how to give him something real. Himself, herself, themself. She’d finally had a grasp on it. It was terrifying, but she was doing it – and Sascha had understood her, this. But now that the party was over and Isi was on this bus, all she could think was, God, what a mess. They tried to hold on to the certainty they’d felt with the group, but it was dissipating. The people outside the centre would see Isi as childish, indecisive, an attention-seeking emotionally immature drama queen. It was okay to dress up to go out, but in real life there were rules: suck it up and grow up.

“Why would I mind,” Sascha said. He was upset that Isi had asked. Isi wished that they could let it go and stop ruining the mood, but they didn’t know how.

“Because.” They looked at Sascha helplessly. Wasn’t it going to be exhausting? For Sascha, too? Sascha could pretend that it didn’t matter, but it did. “It’s more than what you’ve signed up for.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

Before Isi had the chance to argue, Sascha took his hand, and the name-tag with it. “Are you happy,” he asked, very seriously.

“I –“ Isi looked around to see if anyone was watching them, but then she focused on the sensation of having their hand held by Sascha. They took a deep breath. “I am,” they said, steadier. “But it’s going to be hard, and…” Stop, they told themself. Go back. “But I am happy.”

“Then that’s all I want.”

Sascha let go of her hand and settled back into seat, but Isi was still looking at him. The bus, and the drunks and the hooting tourists receded, and Isi was aware again of the pool opening up under the very thin tightrope. Any second now, it would become too much, and they would fall in. It was the same feeling, they realized, as the one he had the day Sascha painted his nails. She’d begun to recognise it as wanting to kiss him. She waited for Sascha to see it.

Then, he did. They didn’t – they were on a bus and it had been only a few hours – but Isi knew that they were both seeing it, and that they both knew what it meant.

#druck #saschisi #i said i needed to sleep on it but a long walk did the trick. #anyway. it's done now.

[bealusith]

I rewatched a clip just now to make sure I got something right and I felt like I was watching at 1.75 speed because the action wasn't broken up by like, three paragraphs explaining Isi's thought process.

[bealusith]

an intervention

ninth in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi sells three tickets to the Abi party.

[Dec. 21] Tuesday 14:37

After everything – Isi still had to sell the tickets to the New Year’s Abi party. He’d promised Ava that he would, so he came to school earlier and took charge of the ticket stand: a school-desk Ava’d commandeered, a poster made by Nora on the wall behind, showing two dancers under a disco ball, leaning in as if they were about to have their New Year’s kiss. Isi did his best to ignore it as he took a seat directly underneath it. The drawing was beautiful, but it depressed him, and he didn’t want others to see him in relation to it. He still felt uneasy coming in to school, even if Constantin was almost never there, and when he was, he didn’t speak to any of them and sat in the back, sunglasses on. Isi hoped he wouldn’t see him today.

The stand was in the spot guaranteed to grant it maximum exposure, and Isi was very aware of the fact. It felt as if the entire school went past him before the first period, glancing at him and at the poster, but unwilling to spend thirty euros on a ticket to a school party. Isi returned to the stand for every break between periods and, failing to sell a single ticket, decided to intervene. He wrote SPECIAL EVENT! 50% PRICE DROP with a leaking black marker on a page he tore out of a notebook and stuck it onto the poster with the pins that were always rolling on the bottom of his backpack, pricking his fingers whenever he needed to find anything. This allowed him to sell three whole tickets.

He had a free period between his classes and the dance practice, which he usually spent on his phone, or getting food with people, but today had to spend minding the stand. Isi realized that it was worse when it was only him and a couple of lingering stragglers in the hallway. It was more obvious that they decided not to approach him after they'd made eye contact and given him the pained smile that Germans do to be polite. When they finally left, Isi leaned on the desk and hid his head in his arms. It was terrible.

He wished that he hadn’t agreed to help but then he pushed it down. He was doing this. The dance practices, too. They didn’t get easier. The team didn’t have a routine, because it was impossible to find anything that would work for everyone. Almost half of the members had absolutely no experience. Kieu My didn’t want to force them to meet her standards, so in the end she’d said that they would improvise. The amateurs would learn the basics, and the experienced dancers would – rediscover the primal joy of the art form, or something. Isi appreciated the solution, and he knew that Kieu My had him in mind when she came up with it, but he knew that he’d feel safer if there was a rigid scheme he could put himself into. It was scary to think that even Kieu My couldn’t come up with a routine that Isi could perform without drawing everyone’s attention to his inadequacies.

Recently, it had become more apparent to him that the second most uncomfortable person on the team was Ava. She hadn’t been complaining nearly as much as Isi did, but he could see her making an effort not to when Kieu My corrected her stance. Kieu My, for her part, was more indirect with Ava than with anyone else, afraid of upsetting her. Isi saw Ava looking in the mirror when she straightened her back. He was an expert on faking it till making it, so he knew how to recognise it. He wished there was something that he could say to make her feel better, but he had no idea what it could be and he worried that it would only make it worse if Ava realized that Isi had noticed. He was the reason she was uncomfortable in the first place.

Isi was exhausted. It felt as if he’d spent all his time these days realizing, over and over, that he was a terrible person who couldn’t get anything right. He’d thought that he did get it right with Sascha, but then it’d turned out that he fucked that up, too, somehow. The thought made his eyes prickle. He fought it for a moment, but when it didn’t stop, he decided that it was time for a bathroom break. He didn’t want to leave the ticket stand, but he’d rather die than be seen crying at school.

The moment he stood up, the school bell rang. The last period was over. With a deep sigh, Isi fell back into his seat. He wiped his face and forced himself to seem pleasant and approachable.

It did not work.

He let the last of the leaving students pass him by – then he saw Ava. He gave her a little wave. She didn’t wave back.

When she stopped in front of the stand, she frowned.

“What is that.”

Isi turned around to see what she was looking at and realized that he forgot to take down his addition to the poster.

Shit. “Er.” Isi didn’t want to say this. “Nobody wanted to buy them…”

“Then you need to try harder,” Ava said. “You have to call out to people, you can’t just wait for them to come to you.” She looked around the hallway and, after identifying the most promising group still there, marched up to them. “Hi, have you got the tickets for the Abi Party yet? We’re selling them over there,” Isi hoped they didn’t see him wince. He listened to Ava give them a whole pitch and, when it turned out they were first-years with no intention of wasting money on the Ball they would never attend, Isi watched her make them get their phones and follow the Abi Committee’s Instagram account. “We have the best merch of all Abi Party committees in Falkenberg,” she said. Isi was sure that she had done the research only to be able to say it.

“Impressive,” he said when Ava got back to the stand.

She shrugged. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”                                            

Isi didn’t know how to respond. This happened anytime he and Ava talked for longer than five minutes. They both knew, and they knew that they knew, that Isi had spent years wishing Ava would shut up because she was making him look bad, and then he had spent years telling her to, even after he’d made sure he looked cooler than anyone else.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not much help.”

Ava sighed. “It’s fine. We made enough on other days.”

It hurt, a little. “I’m bad at this,” he said. “But if there is anything else I can do, I would really like to help.”

“Okay,” Ava said slowly. “I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Cool.” Ava checked her phone. “We should get going, the practice’s in ten.”

She collected the cash and the unsold tickets.

“And the stand?”

“Mailin will get it.”

They went towards the sport hall, Ava first, still on her phone, and Isi two steps behind, not sure if he was supposed to walk next to her, or come up with an excuse and leave her alone.

“Anything exciting?,” he asked at last, motioning towards her phone.

“Committee stuff,” she said. “We’re looking for new members.”

“Right.” Because Isi got himself kicked out, as did everyone else. “How is it going?”

“It’s going okay.”

It did not sound as if it was going okay. Isi considered apologizing again, then decided against it. He looked desperately for things to say.

“Have you – um.” He should’ve stayed quiet, but now it was too late. “Have you talked to Sascha recently?”

Ava looked up from her phone.

“No. Not recently. Why?”

The way she said it made Isi convinced that she knew. He didn’t know if Sascha told her, and what he would tell her, and when, but she knew.

Isi wanted to say that it was nothing and leave – pretend that it’d never happened.

He didn’t.

“I saw him yesterday,” he said. “He seemed – off.” To be specific, Sascha seemed as if the sight of Isi alone caused him acute physical pain. “I don’t think that he wants to talk to me right now, but I don’t want to - leave him alone. I mean.” That was exactly what he meant, but he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “You know.”

He glanced quickly at Ava.

She gave him a moment. “I’ll check up on him,” she said. Isi nodded. “But you should try to fix it - sooner rather than later.”

He finally looked at her. “I will.”

He would not be the reason Sascha was hurt.

#druck #making the most out of the weekend.

[bealusith]

left on read

eighth in a series of missing scenes [ao3 link].

in which Isi comes back from the wellness & wilderness retreat with the boys.

[Dec. 19] Sunday, 10:47

When they passed the sign welcoming them in Berlin, Isi took a blurry picture and sent it to Sascha, adding almost there~ – in case Sascha couldn’t make it out. He checked his ETA in Maps, and went back to the chat to see if Sascha had replied. He hadn’t. He wasn’t online. Once again, Isi looked at the two blue checks under the picture he’d sent yesterday. It was just a stupid picture, and Sascha didn’t have to reply – but he had, usually. Before.

Isi hadn’t known what else to say. He’d liked the moss, and he’d liked how it clung to the tree. Symbiosis. Isi hadn’t meant it as a hint - all he wanted was to say hi – but when Sascha hadn’t replied, he’d begun to wonder if Sascha’d understood it anyway. If he hadn’t replied because he’d understood it. Isi himself didn’t know what do with it, and Sascha would know even less. Isi wanted to see him. It was good when they were together; whatever Isi felt was easier to express when Sascha was there. It became too much only when he had nothing but his phone. Everything looked stupid squeezed into the message box. It didn’t fit.

He’d been so afraid the previous week, and so happy for the past two days, now his mind was splitting in two. It’d been terrifying to think that he and Sascha would not be friends anymore. Isi knew, logically, that he’d survive – that, when enough time had passed, he’d even be fine – but he didn’t want to survive losing another friend. He didn’t want that to be who he was: he wanted to be better. He wanted to be better to Sascha.

When Kieu My said that ‘better’ might have been something else – that there might have been other reasons for Sascha to be upset, not just Isi being a shitty friend – Isi couldn’t even think about it. He felt that Kieu My didn’t get how serious it was, thought that it was Isi being Isi again: a bit of a joke. It was true that he’d never been a serious person, but he was serious now. Lou had teased him, too. But with her, at least, Isi knew where it was coming from. Lou had never needed anything as much as Isi needed to fix things with Sascha. For her, friendship was easy. It was supposed to be a good time, and anything more was overthinking it. If it took a kiss for Isi to find his chill when it came to Lou, well, she’d said, why not try it out with Sascha and get it over with. It wasn’t so simple, Isi had told her. It couldn’t be.

When he’d finally apologized – when it had all poured out of him – he had been so afraid that it wasn’t good enough – that he wasn’t good enough, and Sascha would see it: that Isi had been only a paper cut-out, and not a real person. He was whatever it was easiest and safest to be at any given moment; he had nothing real to give. He didn’t know what he liked or disliked, if he was studious or rebellious, if liked to stay home or go out, if he was confident or not. He didn’t know how to be a good friend: he could put others in a recovery position and distract them afterwards but he had never made the effort to learn anything else. All he could say was that he wanted to do it now.

It was such a relief when Sascha hugged him. It felt so, so good to know that Isi had it, still. Sascha still wanted him there. Isi still made him happy. Sascha had to move first, because Isi never would. He’d stay there and grow old, like ivy on a tree. When Sascha moved and Isi realized how close they were, he’d thought that it’d be easy to kiss Sascha. Isi had never done it before and now he couldn’t tell why. He’d said it couldn’t be that simple but – what if it was? He didn’t do it – then – but he saw that Sascha saw it. Isi wanted to laugh, because it was so obvious now, and he couldn’t even try to play it cool, because he knew that Sascha would see right through it, because he knew exactly what Isi felt – because he knew Isi, and because he felt the same. Isi didn’t know how he made it downstairs without tripping.

He’d spent the entire ride hiding his smile – it was supposed to be, he remembered, an emotional support group trip and he worried that it’d be inappropriate for him to be so happy when Finn was so down. He wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. He barely knew Josh. He didn’t know if he wanted him, or anyone, to know how overwhelmingly, embarrassingly happy he was. It was his. He didn’t want anyone else looking at it. The only person he wouldn’t mind seeing it Sascha, but – but. He’d worried, briefly, when he’d realized that whatever they were going to be now, it would be more difficult than being friends. It would be more difficult for Isi to do it right. He was a worse person than Finn and Zoe, and if they hadn’t figured it out, how could he? But it had felt so good, and now that Isi had it, he couldn’t put it back and pretend that it wasn’t there. He didn’t have the self-restraint. He was going to see Sascha as soon as he’d get home.

Finn stopped the car at the gas station because Josh had asked for breakfast and coffee. Isi would survive on nothing but air and last night’s crackers if he had to, but he didn’t say anything. They ate standing by the highway – Finn didn’t want any crumbs in his mom’s car. She’d never forgiven him the beer spill (Constantin). Isi almost choked inhaling his dry croissant and spent the following seven minutes resisting the urge to rush Josh and Finn. He’d hate to be dismissive of Finn’s heartbreak but it was unbelievable how long it took him to eat a single hotdog. Isi had never seen anyone do it so slow.

An interminable hour later, Isi gave Finn a hard hug goodbye – exchanged an awkward fist-bump with Josh – and practically leapt out of the car. He stopped in front of the door to his staircase and looked up to Sascha’s window. It was closed, which meant that he was in. Isi dashed upstairs. “I’m back,” he shouted coming in and dropping his bag in the hallway, went straight to shower.

After he'd scrubbed himself clean of the forest-grime, did his hair and redid it when he didn’t like it, unpacked his bag because his mom insisted he do it now, he texted Sascha – i’m home!!! – and fell down onto his bed, phone in his hand, set to vibrate. He looked up at the ceiling and willed Sascha to read his texts. When he checked again, Sascha was online. Isi waited for the checkmarks under his messages to turn blue. His hand was sweating. Sascha had read the first message. He’d read them both. Isi sat up, clutching his phone.

There was no reply. After two full minutes had passed, Sascha was offline. Unthinking, Isi called him. Nothing. Nobody ever called anyone on WhatsApp – Isi always assumed that their finger had slipped – but he’d expected Sascha to pick up. He had never not picked up. Isi didn’t know what to do. everything okay???, he typed, then deleted two question-marks, because he didn’t want to make it seem like he was panicking. He hit send and stared at his phone for twenty minutes it took Sascha to read it, and another three Sascha spent online without replying. When he’d disappeared again, Isi put his phone down.

He physically felt himself become anxious. He knew what it was, but knowing didn’t stop it.

Sascha didn’t want to talk to him.

Why didn’t Sascha want to talk to him?

Isi didn’t know.

#druck #saschisi #also the one in which i more or less rewrite episode 8 because what happened there... #also i would like to say that i am capable of coming up with better titles but i am trying to make them sound realistically druck-like.