Flowers don't care about time

(... because they barely have any.)

It’s all Iaden's fault, clearly. I was just perfectly fine this morning, but he had to come with his brilliant ideas. I shouldn’t have listened to him.
Well, I didn’t actually listen to him, because I knew it was a bad plan. I shouldn’t have listened to Sally when she made it an official task for everyone in her team.
Of course, why not? She’s probably having the time of her life, drowning in answers to questions she didn’t know she had, because she’s a secretly immortal swiss army knife to whom everything—and I mean literally everything—is an adventure.
Meanwhile, I’m trapped in this… garden-thing, listening to five chirping birds and sensing how slow the silly flowers open. Why do they have to take so long? It’s not as if they had all the time in the world, you know? Silly things live like a second, for what the universe cares. The universe is still too big to my liking, I only stayed because the lab is fun.
“You were in the universe before you came to the Lab,” Iaden always says. And you know what is crazy? He is serious. He doesn’t understand that The Universe feels different when you leave your supposedly isolated world to experience it from a place where all kinds of aliens come and go with their cool futuristic weapons and weird superpowers.
I never know when one of them is going to try to blow the building up (okay, I did know when there was one, but that was a mere coincidence) and there is always some dangerous thing to deal with. What even makes them think I can do that?
I mean, I can, but how did they know? Why not send a wizard… Not Iaden, of course; he couldn’t be more useless if he tried, because he does try. Anyways. They could send a non pacifist wizard. Or an assassin like Gehrujasa. Or they could sent Fidaki, who is both a wizard and an assassin.
But noooo, let’s ask the Earthling, she’ll do just fine. Worse that can happen is that she gets killed. Right? We’ll have cool flowers for her grave… if they ever decide to actually be flowers.
Why was I thinking about flowers…? Oh, listen. That bird is new. Awww, so cute, it’s a couple.
Ouch. That’s not becoming an actual flower now.
Aren’t birds supposed to use twigs and candy wrappers to build their nest? That’s what they did where I grew up. But of course alien birds would instead weave living vines that are trying to hold a lot of almost-flowers.
They are cute nonetheless. Not pretty—quite the opposite—but cute: working together to build something, with their perfectly synchronized funny little jumps. That’s what the pacifist doesn't understand: I don't sync. He’s fun to be around and doesn’t look half bad, but he’s the family type. Yuck.
But, in a few months (or days, one never knows) when I move on and he’s heartbroken, it will be his own fault because I warned him. I did.
"Soulmates", he says.
Ángel told me that it’s not a romance novel term, just another name for love. “He just recognized you from the start,” he said, “and spared himself all the dating around.” Well, excuse me, but dating is fun. Sure, there is and idiot every so ofte, but even when that happen, spooking them away is hilarious.
I replay in my head the time that huge guy—what was his name again?—invited himself to my first apartment and I convinced him that “no, it’s not the apartment that is haunted, those things happen whenever I go”. He ran so fast when the door flew open after a few minutes ‘stuck’. That's one good side of telekinesis being so rare and keeping it secret.
It’s a good thing that I have those memories for times like this when I could die of boredom.
Stupid Iaden.
Speaking of the devil. I recognize his steps on the gravel. I feel them approach and I’m paying attention but no: I can’t hear him arrive. His steps are like him: soft against any logic. It should be as boring as sitting alone next to a fountain in an inside garden, but I like it.
He comes to sit by my side, saying: “I bet you are thinking about me.”
I can tell that it’s not a pick up line, he actually thinks I was.
“What do you wanna lose?” I tease, instead of asking how he guessed it.
“Lose? Why…? I don’t get it.”
Wait. “Do you know what a bet is, Iaden?”
“I thought it was just an expression.”
I guess it is, when I use it. I explain to him in which cases it isn’t, and once he gets it, he says: “I bet a kiss, then.”
I pretend to be offended. “A kiss is serious.”
He snorts. “To me. But to you… Is it because you know you’d lose?”
Listening to that, I don’t feel like playing anymore. “Pacifists’ village takes kisses so seriously?”
“Some of us do.”
“I can’t let you bet with that then. Because you’d lose.”
“Really?” he says, surprised. “You didn’t spend all these two minutes thinking that you are bored and it’s my fault?”
“I did. I also thought that we are incompatible. And that you are soft. That’s why you would lose.”
“Because I’m… soft? What’s wrong with—?”
“No, you stupid, that’s good. The issue is kissing someone who couldn’t care less.”
He laughs. “I was thinking about you too.”
“This nonsense about meditation and being alone with one’s surroundings to connect with one’s self was your idea! And you are not doing it?”
“I will. But I forgot to tell you that you aren’t supposed to stay still in a quiet place. It’s somewhere you are… close to yourself. I was worried that you would go to sit next to the spring’s room fountain and think I’m stupid.”
Which I did, because he is.
He’s good at reading people, I’ll give him that, but hadn’t he noticed that I’m always close to myself? I mean, where else could I be?

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Just a little scene, not even quite a story, for the Epic Character Challenge organized by LexiCon (WordiGirl).