"Dad lost again! You two are really good at this."
Sighing as he cleaned up his sandbox, my father exclaimed with a smile. After arriving at our apartment, the first thing he did was place me on the bed. Then, leaving for a short while, he returned with an armful of pillows from my parent's room. With a wink and a finger on his lips, he dumped all of them onto our beds and grabbed our chairs.
Draping a blanket between the backs of our two chairs, he made a simple fort and stuffed the pillows inside. He then grabbed three sandboxes and stacked them neatly in the corner.
"This is just for today. When Mom comes back later, I'll distract her. Meanwhile, the two of you throw all these pillows and blankets into the laundry basket in the kitchen."
He winked as he rubbed his hands together, eagerly sharing his plan on how to get rid of all this 'incriminating evidence'. He then scooped me up and laid me next to a set of extremely fluffy pillows. It was my mother's favorite set.
"Mom's going to kill us."
I chuckled as I pressed my whole body into the squares of bliss incarnate. Although I said that, I was pretty sure my father had already gotten permission from my mother and was just playing it up for the two of us. His 'off-work' and 'on-work' personas were so entirely different that, even after living with him for so long, my mother still sighed at his childish actions once in a while.
"Not if she doesn't find out."
Crawling into the fort, my father then gestured for Oliver to join us. And once the three of us were comfortably seated, he placed the sandboxes in front of all of us and opened them up.
"Now what game do we want to play?"
Locking eyes with Oliver, there was only one game that came to mind. The popular battlefield game that we always kept coming back to!
Straightening our backs, the three of us first discussed who came first. The first move was usually the most important, and for a returning player like my father, it only seemed fair that he was given the advantage. The two of us nodded our heads, then discussed who went next. The second and third positions had their own advantages, and after thinking for a while, we finally decided that Oliver would go third while I would go second. Finally, we could start the game!
Even though he was a returning player, my father was not someone to be trifled with. In his first move, he managed to accurately place his soldiers in what was considered the best strategic position. Furrowing my brows, I gazed seriously at the grids in the sand in front of us. Eyes flickering to several good areas, I finally decided on one closer to myself and placed my soldiers there.
Looking up, I saw a concentrated look on my father's face as he watched our moves. Noticing my hot gaze, he dared to give an innocent-looking smile before causally advancing his soldiers towards me.
I tore my eyes away from his face and back to the sandbox, just in time to catch him set a trap on one of the grids I was aiming for. Gritting my teeth, I quickly maneuvered my soldiers onto another path. That original route was ideal for planting my soldiers in the best strategic positions in the game. However, not that that route could no longer be used, I was forced to immediately come up with another route on the spot. It made a mess of all my plans!
And unfortunately, the whole game mirrored this interaction. My father, although he never took the initiative to attack us, was incredibly skilled at disrupting all our plans. For every single square that I aimed for and every single tactic that I planned to use, he was always one step ahead in claiming that square or blocking off that tactic.
In the end, although the two of us managed to gang up against him and win, our soldiers were much lesser and more stretched than usual, and the damage we both received was not something to sneeze at. This made the final battle between Oliver and me a little more lackluster than it usually was.
"Dad lost. The two of you are so good at this!"
Resetting the sandbox in front of him, my dad exclaimed with a smile. Flanking him, Oliver and I shared a raised eyebrow. For some reason, we didn't really believe or feel satisfied with his words.
"One more round!"
I narrowed my eyes as I declared, resetting my own sandbox. However, even though we changed the order of who went first, and my father picked a less strategic spot, the result was still the same. A thinly stretched and unclimatic battle between Oliver and I.
"Dad lost again! You two are really good at this!"
Clearing our boxes, the two of us silently exchanged looks and sighed.
"What's wrong?"
Daring to act as if he didn't understand why the two of us felt down, my father cleared the sandbox and leaned back against the pillows behind him.
"Dad!"
I pouted at him as I also leaned into the pillows behind me. Seeing this, my father chuckled and apologized.
"Sorry, sorry. My bad."
He reached out a hand to each of our heads and brushed through our hair. Calming down, I reached out to entrap his hand with mine and pulled him back to the game.
"If you're really sorry, then teach us."
Although the two of us felt like dolls dancing in the palm of his hand, we had to admit that the strategy and moves he made were really good. And if we learn how it works, in the future, we may be able to create strategies that combat it.
Giving me a helpless look, my father agreed and retracted both his hands.
"Alright. So first, you need to keep an eye on these couple of positions."
Hunching over the boxes, we watched attentively as he explained the theory behind each of his moves. Although I had played this game a hundred times with Leo, the two of us had ignored the theory behind the moves and just moved our soldiers around as we saw fit. And Oliver, who had just joined us recently, was a new player in the game, so he naturally knew nothing.
The two of us nodded our heads as we listened. None of us took notes, but we desperately tried to absorb everything that my father had said. If there was anything we didn't understand or didn't catch, we would stop him and get him to explain or repeat it. Time seemed to pass like water through our fingers, and all thoughts not related to the game got pushed to the back of my mind. Once we were taught the basic theory of the game and his strategy, the three of us started discussing the technicalities of all the strategies we knew. With a smile on our faces, we drew in the sandbox as we discussed, my father growing more and more quiet as he sat and watched us talk. He would occasionally jump in to add some words here and there, but for the most part, he just watched us with a proud, but sometimes complicated, grin on his face.
"For this strategy here..."
Pointing to one of the grids in the sandbox, I was about to start talking about another tactic that I knew when the sound of the doorbell sliced through the safe space we had created and dumped us all back into the cruel world that was reality.
The three of us turned our heads towards the room door. Standing up, my father winked at us to start keeping the fort as he closed the door carefully behind him.
"Do you think Elaine will play along with him?"
The two of us ignored my father's words. Lazily lying down on a pillow, Oliver stared at the door as he gave a yawn. Copying him, I shook my head with a small smile as I imagined my mother giving my father an eyeroll.
"Not at all."
Closing my eyes as I felt the soft filling consume half my body, the two of us descended into a comfortable silence.
"Boys!"
Shattering the still air with a slightly cheerful shout, my mother opened the door to talk to us.
"Once you're finished with the fort, help me place everything in the laundry basket."
Smiling at us, my mother acted as if nothing had happened this morning. Behind her, my father looked a little bummed that nobody wanted to play along with his lighthearted act. However, those feelings were quickly replaced by tender-hearted love and care as I saw my mother sneak her hand into his to comfort him.
The moment Oliver and I nodded our heads, my mother then excused herself from disturbing us and closed the door, leaving the two of us alone in the room.
Once we were alone, Oliver stood up and made his way to the door, locking it, before reaching for a research paper on the bookshelf. In the meantime, I quietly observed him as I cleaned up the sandboxes. Pushing them aside, I laid back down on the pillow and stared at the cloth 'ceiling' of the fort.
Closing my eyes, I could feel the warmth that my parents and Oliver tried so hard to accumulate slowly drain from my body, and an outline of a hanging body seemed to fade into my vision. The transparent image seemed to sway, even though I was lying still, and I could only watch in building nervousness as the translucent image became more opaque.
There was no face on this body; however, my brain immediately recognized his identity. Feeling a deep chill start to form in my heart, the wavering image slowly started coming into focus, approaching me, as if it were a death god walking step by step towards it's target.
"Dan?"
Snapping my eyes open at my name, I looked over at Oliver, research paper in hand, as he gazed at me with a frown.
"Are you alright?"
Putting the paper down on the table, Oliver slid off his chair and sat down next to me. He extended one small hand of his and placed it on my forehead. The warmth from his palm spread out from my forehead to my heart, melting the deadly chill within.
"I'm alright. It's just a nightmare."
I leaned into his hand, my eyes closing once more as I allowed myself to bask in that warmth.
"...if you say so."
Clearly unconvinced, Oliver retrieved his hand from my forehead. I lifted my eyelids slightly to watch as that warm hand reached out for his research paper. Then, shifting to my side, he sat down and allowed his body to sink into the pillow I was on. The two of us were so close that I could feel the body heat radiating off him in small, comfortable waves.
"I'll stay here, so sleep."
He flipped to the next page of his research paper as he spoke, his eyes focused on them as he read.
"Thank you."
I closed my eyes once more, a small smile on my lips, as Oliver's vague humm echoed from my left.
In the darkness, the shimmering illusion seemed to start again. It was smiling menacingly, evil and death radiating off of it as it took one step towards me. However, before it could get any closer, the sound of paper being flipped tore into it, disrupting it's clear image and distracting me from it.
And as the figure tried to gather itself back together again, the sound of another page being turned degraded it's clarity. Making it blurry. As if it were showing me that the image was only a hallucination, so I shouldn't pay it any mind.
'We're just at the stage of finding what it is that we can do.'
Suddenly popping out from where the malevolent figure used to be, Oliver's quote rang throughout my head as it drowned out all other thoughts. These words twisted and curved, mashing together to form a small version of Oliver reading his research papers. That small Oliver turned a page, a look of concentration on his face as he blocked out the rest of the world.
'What we can do'
Echoing in my brain, the phrase seemed to bring the small Oliver out of its reading. It turned to me, the small black eyes pure of thoughts other than those related to his papers. Staring straight into my eyes and into my soul, the small Oliver titled it's head cutely to the side as it evaluated me in it's non-existent heart. Then, after coming to some unknown verdict, he nodded his head towards me before returning back to his research papers.
'What can I do?"
Opening my eyes, I asked myself that question. But what answered me was silence. The cloth 'ceiling' stared at me, and I stared at it back. Honestly, there wasn't much I could do now. Unlike Oliver, I wasn't a genius. I couldn't replicate anything that Oliver was doing right now. Even though I was older than him.
I am not an adult, so anything to do with legal papers that needed to be signed was immediately off the table. I couldn't lend a warehouse for faction meetings, nor could I offer important information during the faction's time of need. What was something that only I could do?
Shifting my sight to the side, I unconsciously focused on big Oliver, who was reading his research paper. Noticing my hot gaze, Oliver tore his eyes away from the words on the paper to look at me. Then, reaching a hand over to cover my eyes, he plunged me into a cozy darkness.
"Go sleep."
Feeling the warmth seep into my eyes from his touch, I gently touched the hand on my face.
If there was something that I could do, I hoped it would be as warm as this.