What It Was For

The night air feels cooler than the apartment, like the city is breathing a little slower above us. I pull the blanket a fraction tighter around my shoulders, not because I’m cold but because the world looks better when it’s wrapped in a thin, familiar layer.

Rikka leans against the balcony rail, her head tilted toward the glow of the distant neon signs. The wind catches her hair, making it flicker like a nervous candle flame. She doesn’t speak, but I can hear the soft sigh that escapes her, a sound that has become a kind of punctuation in our evenings.

I glance at the eyepatch lying on the kitchen table, half-covered by a stack of takeout menus. It’s absurdly ordinary now, a prop that once demanded reverence and now just waits for a place to be put back. I wonder if it still holds any power at all, or if it’s simply a reminder that we once believed in something bigger than ourselves.

“Do you ever think about why we made that… contract?” I ask, keeping my tone flat enough that it could be a joke about a school assignment. My voice feels oddly thin against the hum of traffic below.

She turns her gaze toward me, eyes half-lit by the streetlights. “You mean the Wicked Eye thing?” she replies, the words slipping out as if she’s reciting a line from a play she’s not sure she wants to finish.

I nod, feeling the weight of a question that has been hovering over us for months. “Yeah. I mean, we were kids. We made it up to… I don’t know, survive? To keep something from falling apart.”

She lets out a short laugh that doesn’t reach her eyes. “We were trying to keep the world from breaking, weren’t we?” She pauses, the silence stretching between us like a thread waiting to be tugged.

I shift my weight, the concrete under the balcony railing feeling solid but somehow distant. “What about your dad? Did the… eye… hold anything up for him?”

Rikka’s shoulders tighten for a heartbeat, then relax. She looks out over the city, as if the answer might be written in the flickering billboards. “My dad… he left when I was twelve,” she says, the words almost a whisper. “He never explained why. He just… vanished, like a character exiting a scene without a curtain call.”

I feel my own breath catch. The absurdity of the situation—two teenagers with an imaginary eye, a contract, and a missing father—feels like a punchline that never lands. “And you thought… what? That the eye could… patch the hole?”

She chuckles, a sound that seems to vibrate with both humor and something deeper. “Exactly. The eye was supposed to be the thing that kept the darkness at bay. It was supposed to hold up the sky, keep the shadows from swallowing us. In reality, I think it was just… a way to keep my dad’s absence from feeling like a hole.”

I watch a car pass, its headlights tracing a brief line across the skyline. “So the eye wasn’t actually holding up anything,” I say, deadpan, “just your imagination?”

Rikka looks at me, her expression softening. “It held up my imagination, yeah. And maybe a little bit of hope. When I thought the Wicked Eye could see the truth about my dad, I was trying to make sense of why he left. I wanted a reason that fit the story we told ourselves.”

I think about the way we’d spend afternoons drawing sigils on notebooks, chanting nonsense spells that sounded like they came from a cheap anime soundtrack. “We were basically making up a mythology to explain a family drama,” I say, trying to keep the tone light.

She nods, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Exactly. We turned a painful blank space into something we could control. The eye was… a placeholder. It gave me something to focus on while the real world kept moving.”

The wind picks up, scattering a few loose leaves across the balcony floor. I pick one up, feeling its brittle edges. “Do you think… the eye ever actually helped you? Like, did it make the hole less… empty?”

Rikka’s eyes flicker to the leaf, then back to me. “I think it helped me survive the first few years after he left. It gave me a story to tell myself, a reason to keep going. When the story stopped making sense, that’s when it started to feel… heavy.” She sighs again, this time louder, as if releasing a breath she’d been holding for a long time.

I place the leaf back down, feeling its softness against the metal railing. “And now?”

She leans back, looking at the city lights as if they were a canvas she could paint over. “Now the story’s a little faded. The eye is still there, but it’s not the main character. I still have the memory of it, and I still have the feeling that something was being held up. I just don’t know what.”

I glance at the eyepatch again, the way it sits on the table like a relic. “Do you ever wish you could go back and… rewrite it? Change the contract?”

Rikka chuckles, and the sound is a little more genuine this time. “I think I already rewrote it. I stopped pretending the eye could see my dad’s motives. I started looking at him as a person who walked away, not as a villain in a grand plot.”

I let the words sit for a moment, feeling the absurdity of our teenage fantasies colliding with the plainness of adult reality. “So the eye was… a scaffolding for you. When the scaffolding was taken down, you had to build the walls yourself.”

She nods, eyes still on the horizon. “Yeah. The scaffolding held up the sky while I was too young to build walls. When I grew up, I realized the sky was still there, but I could see it without a patch. I could still look up and find stars, even if I didn’t have a magical eye to point them out.”

A taxi honks far below, its sound echoing off the concrete. I smile, because the world continues to make little noises that remind us we’re alive, even when we’re not the heroes of a grand narrative.

“Do you think my dad ever thought about his own… eye?” I ask, half-joking, half-curious. “Did he have his own version of a Wicked Eye, maybe a different story he told himself?”

Rikka turns to me, a faint glimmer of mischief in her eyes. “Maybe he did. Maybe his eye was just… a briefcase full of unpaid bills and a schedule that didn’t leave room for being a dad. Maybe his ‘eye’ was simply the excuse he gave himself for leaving.”

I let the image settle: a man in a suit, a briefcase, an invisible eye that watches the clock. It’s absurd, but the absurdity feels fitting. “That’s… kind of sad,” I say, though my tone remains flat.

She reaches out, brushing her fingers against my arm. The contact is brief but warm, like a promise that even if the eye is gone, the connection remains. “It’s also kind of freeing. Knowing that my dad’s ‘eye’ wasn’t some grand, cosmic power, but just… him. It means I don’t have to carry his unfinished story forever.”

I nod, feeling the tension in my shoulders ease a little. “So the eye was never about seeing the truth. It was about making a truth we could live with.”

Rikka’s smile widens. “Exactly. It was a lie we told ourselves that felt true enough to get us through.”

The city below us hums with life—people moving, lights flickering, the occasional siren wailing. It’s ordinary, and that ordinariness feels oddly magical after all the grand gestures we used to imagine.

I glance at the kitchen table again, where the eyepatch rests beside a half-finished bowl of ramen. It looks like any other kitchen utensil now, a thing that belongs in a drawer, not in a story. “Do you think we’ll ever need it again?” I ask, not really expecting an answer.

She looks at me, her eyes reflecting the city’s glow. “Maybe when we need a reminder that we once believed in something bigger than ourselves,” she says, her voice soft. “Or maybe when we need a little drama in a boring Tuesday. Either way, I’ll keep it somewhere safe, like a souvenir from a past life.”

I chuckle, the sound low and sincere. “A souvenir from a past life. That sounds about right.”

She leans her head against the railing, and we sit in silence for a while, letting the night’s sounds fill the space between us. The wind whistles through the cracks, a gentle reminder that even the smallest breath can move things.

I think about the contract we made, the ridiculous terms we wrote down in crayon, the solemn vows we swore over a cardboard box that claimed to be a portal. It all feels distant now, like a childhood game that we’ve outgrown but still keep in the back of the mind for comfort.

“Do you remember the first time we said the incantation?” I ask, half-teasing.

Rikka’s eyes light up, the absurdity of the memory pulling a grin onto her face. “We tried to summon the ‘Wicked Eye’ and ended up summoning a stray cat from the neighbor’s balcony. It stared at us like it knew we were idiots, then strutted away like it owned the world.”

I laugh, the sound echoing into the night. “We were such dramatics.”

She shakes her head, still smiling. “We were dramatics, but we were also brave. We tried to make sense of a world that didn’t make sense. We built a myth to protect a heart that was already broken.”

The moment stretches, and I feel a quiet gratitude settle over me. We don’t need the eye to see each other’s pain; we already see it, plainly, without any magical lens. The honesty in that is both terrifying and freeing.

“Thanks for talking about this,” I say, the words more sincere than any joke I could have made. “I think… I think I understand a little more why we needed it.”

Rikka’s gaze returns to the skyline, where a faint orange glow hints at the sunrise that will soon chase away the night. “And I think I’m okay with the eye being gone,” she replies. “Because I have you to remind me that even without a wicked power, we can still be… kind of heroic in our own small ways.”

I turn my head toward the balcony door, the faint click of the lock sounding like a tiny applause. “Small ways, huh? Like remembering to water the plant in the kitchen?”

She laughs, a sound that feels like sunshine breaking through a cloud. “Exactly. That’s our new contract now: keep the plant alive, keep the ramen warm, and never stop making terrible jokes about our teenage delusions.”

I grin, feeling the absurdity of it all settle into something comfortable. “Deal.”

The night deepens, but the city continues its steady rhythm. The eyepatch rests on the table, untouched for now, a relic of a time when we needed to hold up the sky with a piece of cloth. It’s still there, waiting, but we no longer need it to see the world.

We sit side by side, shoulders barely touching, the wind tugging at our hair, the distant hum of the city a lullaby. In that quiet, I realize that the contract we truly keep is not written in ink or sealed with a wicked eye, but in the small, honest moments we share—moments that hold up the sky in their own quiet way.