The convenience store had long been abandoned, plans made to renovate, innovate, reinvent the small building having never completely come to term. Aborted before really given life. Piles of rubble and old signs littered the small parking lot, indications of various unfulfilled promises that this building would become more than what had been left. Litter, cigarette butts, discarded condoms and broken beer bottles, remnants of life that emphasized the lack of it. Lost and broken and there were no king's men who could muster up the time, energy, or money to put the store to work again.

The door to the perhaps-a-7-11 (the sign indicating its chain, if it belonged to one, had worn away to white plastic) was long gone, the hinges ripped with strength that seemed foreign and misplaced. The entire city was like that at times, pieces that didn't fit and yet, didn't stand out. Little idiosyncrasies, houses painted odd colors and things that shouldn't fit in and then they did, and what a grand irony for a city so focused on conformity.

This store rested on the outskirts, near a small collection of scraggly trees that had long been deprived of a healthy full life. That's what this area did, though, to various things in varying amounts. It certainly did not take kindly to trees. Too hot, too dry, and the pollution poured thick. Hardy thin trees, some fruit trees, the ridiculous palm trees that looked as though they had escaped a children's book, had acclimated to the region admirably. The scraggly ones beside the abandoned store were not so lucky or adaptable. They merely fought for a life that perhaps would have been easier somewhere else.

Around this area hung the air of possibility, of lost chance. Perhaps if something had been different, if just one more purchase had been made, if they had stocked one item rather than another, if they had advertised in a different place at a different time, maybe this store would not be in the state it was in now. Maybe in a different city, this would be a thriving corner store for the insomniacs who craved that late night Brainfreezy.

Who knew.

The possibilities for the tiny building were endless. Not just for the failures of its past, the potential reinvention if something had been different, but for the sheer amount of possibilities that had passed the store by. The signs listed several different things this building could have been once, and yet it had not become any of them. It remained the same, a building trapped in some strange vortex of stability, permanence. There was no doubt that this building would remain, a solid fixture of the outskirts of the city nearby. No one cared enough to tear it down, and no one cared enough to make it something.

Invisible, in a way.

Graffiti repeated and repeated around the walls, as if someone was practicing their penmanship with an aerosol can, and the shards of broken glass from the main display window still glittered on the asphalt. No one cared enough, and therefore a character had been developed from the neglect. The abandoned store had become something in the fact that no one had cared about it to change anything. The steadiness of its random features became commonplace, intentional. Absorbed to become deliberate and planned, and it became something more than what its owners may have imagined when they moved out. Defined by inaction.

The shelves inside were long swept clear of anything of any monetary value, although now the remaining empty bottles and plastic pieces of snacks long gone contributed to the overall character of the lonely place. A thin layer of dust, a broken light bulb, and a dimness that was comforting in the summer heat.

Nothing nearby, not really. Beside a highway but not close enough, and the scraggly trees waved in the too-infrequent wind. Dust and dirt all over and the sun made the air shake and distort.

They sat in the doorway, enough in the shade but not too far into the building. After all, it had been some time since its human inhabitants had left, and the inhuman could have made a happy home. Snakes, scorpions, anything. Not too far in.

"I like coming here."

Johnny had his back against one side of the doorjamb, looked at Edgar with eyes half-lidded from the heat. Edgar leaned back on his own side of the doorway, felt the uneven stucco scratch through his shirt that was too stifling.

He knew why, and he just nodded.

Edgar turned to look at the heat waves bouncing from the asphalt. He was not looking forward to walking back to his house in this, although maybe later this evening it would cool off a little.

On a positive note, Johnny was coming with him, as he did on weekends. Didn't stop the day from being insufferably hot and miserable though, and Edgar didn't want to move. Sweat trickled down his back and his sides and made him feel sticky and dirty and generally disgusting. His discomfort was a little offset since he knew that Johnny was not doing much better. He may have been thinner, but this heat would get to anyone.

Not alone.

"I took you for more of a night person, myself," Edgar said merely because it had been almost ten minutes since either of them had said anything, and he was worried that if he didn't say something he'd fall asleep. The heat had that effect on people. Johnny turned to look at him again, his eyes still half-closed.

"Things are more interesting at night, yeah." He shifted a bit, and Edgar could see his shirt sticking to his skin. "But sometimes it's nice to be somewhere...away. Even when it's this unbearably hot."

"It's a..." Edgar wanted to say "nice place," but that wasn't true. It wasn't. It was a broken down abandoned building, and such things are not nice. This one had character, but that did not necessarily make it nice.

Then again, that may have just been him.

"It's got...it's a neat place."

Neat. Smooth.

It was too hot to tell if he was blushing or not at his faux pas, and frankly he didn't care if he was. He didn't think he would be. His skin tingled all over, from the general sensation of sweating and the fact he hadn't moved for some hours. He had his backpack by his side and the arm that was resting on it was stuck to it by now for sure.

"Makes you think." Johnny's eyes rested on one of the rusted signs on the black and yellow nearby. "What things are."

"Yeah." Edgar wanted to nod but instead stayed still. First thing he would do when he got back was take a shower. He didn't want to move since he knew that remind him of how much grit and sweat had worked its way into the folds and bends of his skin. "I know what you mean."

Johnny's hand twitched, and perhaps if they weren't in such a quiet mood he would have turned to face him a bit more actively. "What do you think defines this place, right now? Do you think it was the fact that once it was a store? Is it still a store now, or is it just...a building? Something different?"

Edgar felt a slight twinge of accomplishment in knowing he was right about why Johnny liked this place. Provided an interesting metaphorical backdrop to the holes in his memory, and now...

"Was it always a store?" Edgar sighed just to feel the air fill his chest. Johnny stared for a few more seconds, then nodded, apparently satisfied.

"What defines this place as...this place? Is it the building, what was in the building, what the building became?"

"For it to be what it is now, it had to be a store first..." Edgar felt as though maybe he should be debating or answering Johnny's questions, but instead he just felt like letting his thoughts wander. He had his own questions after all, and he felt tired and heavy. "It can't be what it is now without being what it was before..."

"But how much of what it is now depends on what it was before?" Johnny did raise a hand this time, gesturing to the dim and dusty interior. "How much of it once being a store really...defines it as what it is now?"

"If it wasn't a store before...would it still be the same now? If it was a pharmacy, would it be the same thing?" Still not quite arguing with him, and Edgar closed his eyes. "If it was a toy store, would the feeling be the same?"

Johnny let his hand fall back in his lap, and outside there was the general buzzing of some kind of insect.

"Or is it just a combination of everything..." Edgar opened his eyes, and his eyelids felt sticky. "Is it just a combination of the building, the store, the bankruptcy, the graffiti, all the little things...they all just add up into what we have now. If one piece was missing, would it be the same? Is this place as we know it a delicate balance of what happened before, determined...all the pieces pointing to it being this way? Could they have saved this store if they did something differently?"

"If they knew that...would that change anything?"

"If the owners knew what they did wrong...would it make this place any less abandoned?"

Johnny slowly shook his head, and Edgar knew that metaphor wouldn't translate, not accurately. There was a difference between a building and a person.

"If its past is not what we think it was...maybe it was a toy store. Maybe it wasn't. All of it though, whether we know it or not, defines what it is now, don't you think?"

Johnny leaned his head back against the doorjamb and sighed. Edgar wasn't sure if it was for the same reason as his own.

"How important is its past?"

"It had to have been inhabited to be abandoned." Edgar brushed some of his hair back and found his hand came back damp. He rubbed it off on his shirt without much success ."If someone inhabited it now, it wouldn't be abandoned."

"You can't stop that though...if someone really came through and bought this place..."

"Well..." Edgar lifted a hand and gestured at the signs outside. "People already have tried...nothing changed."

"How permanent do you think it is? How permanent is this little place?"

"It depends." Edgar rested his hand back in his lap. "I don't think anything is really permanent...things are always changing. I think...I think if your changes are consistent with what you did before...then nothing changes. Does that make sense?" Edgar had a sneaking suspicion that it didn't.

Johnny shrugged. "I don't know..."

The two of them turned to watch the heat wave and distort, almost audible.

"Sometimes I don't want things to change..." Edgar turned to look at Johnny, who kept speaking without looking at him. "There's this...kind of uncertainty. A kind...a kind of foreboding I get about it...thinking about it. Thinking about...it almost makes me frightened. That something horrible is going to happen. But I feel like...it has to happen, somehow. Sometimes I just want to...I want to stop it, right now. I want to stop everything so that nothing can ever change, nothing can ever go wrong. I just want to...I just want to freeze time. Just...stop everything."

Edgar stared at him and his heart was going entirely too fast.

"Just this general sense that...something is going to go wrong. That something will always go wrong...is that it? Is that something of mine that you remember? Bad luck?"

Edgar looked down at his hands very carefully.

"I guess...in a way. Yeah, I'd say you weren't...the luckiest of people, sure."

"So this kind of fear...of losing, or of-...is that mine? Or is that his?" Johnny narrowed his eyes at Edgar as if somehow it was his fault that this fear had arisen. Edgar wanted to keep his eyes trained on his hands and yet somehow they kept darting up to meet Johnny's now and again.

"The litter here...is it from the store, or is it part of the building now?" Not sure how else to answer, how to respond. "The bags bought from the store, they were there at first...and now they're here, and they're...a part of this now. Then and now. They're...both. Both of you."

He didn't think that would be an answer Johnny would like.

"He was afraid of things changing, too?"

Those vague strands he could recall, long conversations and Devi's name, and the bits and pieces he put together to try and get an idea of what happened. It had faded, long ago and then fairly recently, when this new Johnny had come and tried to take the one of his memory's place. He couldn't remember the specifics anymore, what had happened, but he had a feeling as to why. He felt that he knew why Johnny had tried to kill her, as he was sure he did at one point. No specific memories, but he felt sure that something like that had happened, and this fear of change was a factor in it somewhere. Related. Things were getting so vague, heat lines through his memory but he knew it was there.

"In a way..." Edgar tried to think of how to phrase this. "I think he was really afraid...more afraid of losing what he cared about."

Johnny turned to stare back at the parking lot. Edgar decided to continue.

"That feeling...I think it's that fear that you may lose something if...something changes. If the world around you, or your understanding of yourself...if it changes, will you lose something you care about?"

Johnny glanced back at him with what looked like resentment, but Edgar couldn't say for sure. He turned back to the asphalt.

"If this place changes, will it be the same?"

Didn't look back at him.

Edgar tried to think of what to say.

"I think...what happens, what will happen to us- to you and me, I think...I don't think that change is..." Ran another hand through his hair. "I think that it depends on what we decide to do about it. If...if you want to be what you are, if you really want to stay what you are, if you're determined and really...really dead-set on what you are as you are now, if you have it...really have it, you have it and you won't let go...then I don't think anything would change that. I think...that if you really feel...definite, then nothing can really change you. You won't...lose anything. You adapt."

"Adapt..."

"I think it's this desire to be...permanent. That was something...he had back then, too. Kind of. I think that...but I promised, and I still..." Edgar watched him, and caught the occasional flick as Johnny glanced to look at him. "I..."

"What is it that you want, really? What are you working for?" Johnny tilted his head at the blue sky. "Do you want the store, for what it gave you a long time ago? Is this enough, is this empty place what you really want, or are you working...are you just the latest owner, to get it running again?"

"We've gone over this..." Edgar shook his head, but kept watching him.

A silence, and the air flowed off the pavement, rebounding back to the sky and back again, and there were no clouds and the heat felt visible and touchable. Edgar watched a bead of sweat make its way down Johnny's neck to soak into his shirt.

"I like this place."

Johnny stared at him through the corner of his eye for a few long minutes, watching him. Edgar scratched at his chin where a few hairs were growing.

"You can't ever shop here again. What if it never becomes a store again? Isn't that why you came all this way?"

Edgar tilted his head and looked back up at the sky, although he had to squint to block out some of the light.

"I don't need to, anymore. I don't want...what that store offered me anymore. That was a long time ago and now...I think I've...sometimes things don't work out the way you plan. Sometimes things aren't how you think they'll be, and the important thing is to be able to...adapt."

Johnny reached out for the small CD player by his side. He wasn't wearing his headphones, as the heat made them extremely uncomfortable, but it was there, as always. Volume kicked up enough so that it was audible to both, although tinny, and while Johnny had turned it off before to conserve the batteries, he now began to play with the buttons.

"Adapt again."

"Yeah..."

An opening sustained note, and then a piano melody began through the small speakers, muffled by the air and then a percussion line that reminded him of trains, of travel.

"I don't consider this to be...empty. I don't...compare it to the store as it once was." Edgar closed his eyes for a few seconds. A soft male vocalist harmonized quietly, but Edgar wasn't paying attention to the words at the moment.

Johnny rested the CD player on his lap.

"What this is now...is its own place. And..."

A call, the sound of train tracks still and the image of dust churned by whirling wheels, old transportation too stubborn to die. Cutting through this area which seemed so lifeless now, even though buildings were in sight right across the highway.

Nothing else in the world, and...

Johnny had his eyes closed, and Edgar cleared his throat a little, found it shockingly dry and tight when he actually paid attention to it. The heat was getting to him, even in the shade, and he was desperately thirsty now. He coughed to try and keep his voice smooth.

"I like where I am now. I like this place as it is, even...without everything as it once was. This place is...what it is. What I know about it before doesn't change that...what I expected...it doesn't matter, necessarily. What matters is...I like where I am now."

"They're...different but the same. It's hard to explain. But I can't...I can't really choose one over the other, and...when it comes down to it...I'm not sure I want to."

Johnny opened his eyes, kept them down and ran his finger across the CD player's buttons.

"I came here today...not because this place was a store, but because of what it is now...what you told me about it. I came with you because you told me that this place was abandoned, that it was...something different. Not because a long time ago it was a store, but because of what it is now...

"I know that...I did expect something else when I....but...people change their minds, and..."

Johnny kept staring, and the song continued on.

"It's you, right now." His heart beating hard and fast. "It's you and this place, right now, that matters to me. And I wouldn't...this is what I want. Where we are, what we're doing...now. I want...now."

Johnny looked up at him.

"What happened before, what will happen...it's just too hot to think about it." Edgar chanced a nervous smile. "This place, this time, today and you."

And before he could stop himself, the words came from a throat too dry. "I want you."

Johnny tilted his head slightly, and Edgar wanted to die.

Edgar hoped he didn't look nearly as embarrassed as he felt. Johnny stared at him a little bit longer, and then a grin came across his face. He reached out with one thin hand and found Edgar's on his lap. Their skin immediately stuck together.

"Well, I guess that's good enough for me."