Ast got in his car and drove the rest of the way home, took the bottles out of the paper bag and placed them in a backpack stored behind the passengers seat, utilising its two separate compartments to avoid them clanking against each other in the paper bag. He didn't want to give his neighbours the possibility to know he was drinking, though after years living nearby and shared recycling, they no doubt would have known this was a regular occurrence for him, nevertheless he avoided giving them any excuse to think about him any more than he felt they had to.

Tonight was one of the first nights in a while where Ast was drinking primarily because he wanted to and not out of instinctive habit, this was signified by him grabbing a glass to drink out of rather than the usual straight out of the bottle. The psychology behind this was that he knew he was going to drink a lot tonight so he should at least be consciously aware of how much he was drinking in order to keep it under control but this never did anything to reduce his drinking.

After checking his silver was still there he searched up the latest on the war to find out that Romanian President Solca with NATO approval had launched an airstrike on the Russian backed MRA headquarters in eastern Moldova, just a few weeks after the UN had labelled it a terrorist organisation. This was one of the few times he agreed with the media, that this would no doubt lead to an all out war in a matter of weeks, possibly escalating to nuclear. He wasn't shaken, he had been mentally prepared for this for years and in a sense even welcomed it, he wasn't personally afraid of death or a breakdown of society, he kept a year worth of supplies and thought the general population was overdue some great tragedy that was needed periodically for them to take their lives seriously. He saw an opportunity in this, deeming it poetic timing, he could finally utilise his life experience to produce something in the form of his poem and it might be his last chance, he might die immediately after or even during making it. It was almost the plot within his poem playing itself out in its own creation, a strange coincidence he thought. He spent the rest of the night listening to various talking heads share their opinions, not learning much but watching it more as entertainment to see what was happening (or about to happen) in the psychology of the average person, almost like a zoo. As he got drunker throughout the night he devolved into more and more mindless channels and ended up listening to a bunch of nostalgic songs before passing out before midnight in his computer chair.

His alarm woke him up and he managed to get to work on time, his bosses phone was not out on his desk and under his brief inspection, his boss looked like he always did, he felt like he must have over thought the phone on the desk like he over thinks a lot of things, he was still determined to write his poem but due to his hangover he spent most of the morning reading low quality news articles. In the afternoon he tried to plan out how he would patch things up with Ner, convinced that she hated him again. He determined a certain approach to take then an hour later abandoned that angle completely and dreamed up another approach, he never settled on a strategy but wasn't concerned, he thought he had nothing left to lose with the world ending.

He met her at her apartment right after work, it was a dingy little place in a two story complex with six on the bottom floor where she resided, she had a direct door from the outside with a north facing deck where she grew a lot of vegetables in various planters which he inspected before knocking, finding them full of weeds at odds with her supposed gardening the day before. She almost sprinted out of her bedroom when she heard him knocking which he felt to be out of character for her and she stood on his feet as she hugged him.

"Ner?" he still used her name 99% of the time, only resorting to nicknames if he wanted to troll or if he was in a particularly strange mood.

"Ast?" she loosened the hug a little so she could look at him properly.

"Hi..." he paused but she waited for him to continue "I missed you"

"Same, but I've been here, come inside" her hand tried to grab onto his to drag him inside but the lack of commitment to the motion and his own unresponsive dead hand just made hers massage his and then draw away like one of those old arcade claw games.

He followed her inside and looked around, everything looked as usual except for Ner, he thought she looked like shit and he was considering being his usual blunt self but decided against it due to her warm welcome, worried she might have recently experienced a sensitive negative experience. She went into the kitchen and grabbed a few beers as he sat down at the counter, he shook his head as she offered one to him by waving it silently in front of herself.

"I drunk too much last night" he said

"Is everything ok?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, how are things with you?"

"Better, I've been pretty sick"

Ast instantly didn't believe her, the tone of her voice which he could now discern confidently lead him to believe she was lying.

"Do you want to talk about it?" he asked, Ner had many subtle tells when she was lying and in this case Ast attempted to use one of her more reliable ones, her tendency to over explain unimportant things in a lie, it wasn't so much that she would say too much or that she would contradict herself or say something questionable that raised his suspicions but he could tell when she was sharing things that wouldn't naturally be meaningful to her as he knew her intimately. A casual acquaintance would be hard pressed to catch her lying in this way or in any way, Ner was a very smart woman and as such a very skilled liar at least in an empirical sense, she had a solid intuition for what stories would be believable and could keep track of all the little details in her lies that she had told to not contradict herself. However, her self awareness and emotions still had holes which Ast was now largely aware of and he used them to relatively consistently discern when she was lying. He tried to hide his awareness of this tendency of hers and all her other little tells, having only called her out on her almost pathological lying a couple of times.

While Ast rarely lied, he could usually empathise with her reasoning behind the important lies even if they were selfish such as when she was cheating on him or when she was lying to make herself appear better. However, her meaningless lies offended him more, the fact that she would lie to him about things that he considered weren't even worth lying about as if she didn't care about living in reality with him.

Ast had worked out her nature to overshare when she was lying entirely on his own but had later learned from watching interrogation videos that it was a very common tell in people, with the help of these videos teaching him what to look out for he started to notice many other small tells in her, a slight tone change in her voice, some almost imperceptible fidgeting (particularly of her feet), increased eye contact, an over compensation based on her belief that if she didn't look at him as much then he would know she is lying, due to her faulty perception of how often she naturally looked at him. While he couldn't confirm it, at this point he thought it was impossible for her to get anything completely past him without him noticing and in a way this improved his trust in her even though he still noticed constant lies of various magnitudes.

"No, I'm fine now" she took a big gulp of her beer.

This took Ast aback, he had been sure she had been lying and still tended to believe she was, yet this sounded convincing to him in her tone and the way she spoke, either she isn't in her usual state of mind or to a large degree she truly believes she isn't lying, or at least not lying much, he went with the latter. Maybe she is lying but she really thinks she was sick in some vague sense of the word, a sickness of the mind perhaps, but what could that mean? depression? internal conflict? it could be anything... maybe she was second guessing her relationship with me and sick with emotion, that would explain why she was so happy to see me, it would be similar to how she over shares when she is lying, she is over compensating for how little she cares about me by acting like she cares about me so much. Surely she can tell that this is out of character for her though, maybe she isn't thinking straight, maybe she has actual problems, I should check she is actually alright before I risk confronting her.

These thoughts weren't exactly in words and as such they didn't take as long as one might think but he was still rapidly approaching the awkward period of time for silence, he had bought a few more seconds with a smile and by staring at her as if he was waiting for her to speak but by the time she had finished her gulp and she looked at the clock it was clear to both of them that it was his turn to speak, he didn't know how to go about finding what was really happening within her mind so he took a step back.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Let's get some Chinese takeout, ill buy" the fact that he had said he was buying was largely an empty gesture, while neither of them were rich by any stretch, they both lived very frugal simple lives and had far more money than they knew what to do with. He only offered to pay ahead of time when he was trying to make her feel like he cared about her more than he actually did, he wasn't aware of his tendency to do this but Ner had worked it out in him.

"Yes, let us" she replied slow and methodically, enunciating the words carefully, he had never heard her say this exact phrase and it was in a peculiar way, it made him question that she was lying and was now second guessing that she might just not be in her regular state of mind.

It was a beautiful spring evening and there was still a lot of sunlight, he noticed the smell of freshly cut grass in the neighborhood which he hadn't on his arrival although it must have been there, the smell reminded him of weed and his mind started replaying those accompanying days of deep depression as they walked hand in hand down the street. Even though he was on the verge of suicide for almost ten years, he looked back on those days fondly as if they were the time of his life, he couldn't work out if it was simply his age, the culture of the world at the time or simply his lack of responsibilities but he missed those days, particularly how they all blended into one as if he existed outside of time and wasn't at the mercy of reality. Eventually his mind came back to her and trying to work out what was happening within her brain. They didn't talk as they walked, they would occasionally interact, squeezing each others hand, pointing out some strange person or graffiti but these interactions (at least from Ast's perspective) were manufactured and just enough to maintain a façade that they were truly together in this moment and provide the distance desired from the reality that he was stuck in his own mind.

Ner decided for the both of them to eat in the restaurant rather than take it away and they sat down by the window, Ast ordered a smorgasbord for the two of them along with a beer each.

Ast placed his hands together on the table, looked at her then looked down at them before realising how dramatic he must appear and took them away "So, there is something important that i've been wanting to ask you for a long time" normally he would just ask anything boldly, particularly deep and meaningful questions without giving any warning, finding a sense of self satisfaction in what he considered to be a unique and honorable personality trait of his, defying the rules and being unique, such a poser... but in this case and most cases where he would give advanced warning that the question was important, he wasn't using it to prepare her, give her the opportunity to postpone or avoid the question, to get her into the right state of mind or to even give the question the serious respect it deserved. He, like usual was just using this warning as a means to gather more information on her, to see how she would react, to watch how excited she would be in anticipation of a meaningful question and more importantly to see if the question lived up to her expectations in terms of importance once it was delivered, to see if it was as meaningful to her as it was to him. He had hoped one day he might catch a glimpse of her wrongly expecting a marriage proposal but had perhaps used this same pre-emptive warning too frequently for it to currently convey that much weight, he thought he would stop using it so much to let it build back its importance but needed to cash in on it right now.

She placed her hands on the edge of the table and started tapping her fingers, Ast unable to tell whether this was fidgeting was conscious or not, whether it signified excitement, anxiety or what. She could tell that his warning wasn't for her sake, that he was trying to gather information so she was intentionally trying to convey conflicting signals to throw him off.

"Of course, you can ask anything"

Her tone made him think that she wasn't expecting anything significantly meaningful, the fact that she wasn't taking him as serious as he wanted to be taken annoyed him. He really was planning to ask something incredibly important to him but now he tried to think of an even more important question to spite her, to punish her for thinking she knows his motives beyond what the words themselves say. He failed to come up with anything more important and stuck to his planned question.

"What does your name mean? where does it come from?" he had wanted to ask this since before their first date but instead felt it would be more poetic to never know, however now he felt 'ever' was ending and believed their relationship was in desperate need of some deep conversation.

She spent a good ten minutes recounting the story in great detail, and while Ast usually could remember every word she spoke for a few hours afterwards (even surrounding unimportant matters), the fact that this topic was so meaningful to him caused his mind to wander to the possible implications of this story. He only remembered the key points of the story afterwards, that her parents met as late teens at a holiday camp while her dad was making an amateur movie, her dad was immediately attracted to her mother and asked her to star in the movie to which she accepted, he gave her mother the option to choose the name of her character in the movie and she chose Ner, they fell in love while filming this movie that was never shown to the general public and still exists somewhere at their house.

He waited for a good minute after she finished the story to make sure there wasn't any more that she had to add and to portray that he was reflecting on it but he had already decided which questions to ask early into the recounting of the story.

"So... why did your mother choose the name Ner for her character though?" he eventually asked.

"I never asked"

"Don't you care?"

"Sure, I care, maybe I will ask one day"

"But...?"

"But what? it's enough for me that my name brought them together, that's special enough"

"Yeah, I guess, I just... I think I would like to know"

"I do want to know, I plan to ask one day" She was starting to get a little agitated so he took a breath to think.

"Interesting, I really get it, it reminds me of why I put off asking about your name for so long, it was a nice mystery, I was scared that the actual explanation for the name would be meaningless and it would reduce the wonder I have for you, plus, I think there is something special about intentionally not knowing important things about people who are important to you"

"Did you think they might have just thrown darts at letters and came up with Ner?" she paused "Sorry, bad joke"

"I know" he laughed really loudly and wanted to clarify that he wasn't laughing about how bad the joke was but rather his own response but she replied before he had finished.

"Well, did it reduce the wonder?"

"Not at all, it's poetic, even before you were born you were creating love in people and now you do the same for me and saved me from the depths of my own soul" the last part was said in an overly melodramatic way to match with the angsty words, a vain attempt to hide the truth behind a joke, from who he was hiding this truth wasn't clear, they both understood she had helped him escape a dark time in his life.

"Right... I'm worried my mother might have just chosen the name without much reason, but I guess that would still be fine?"

"It depends" he had planned to say more but he noticed the waiter approaching, he didn't stop out of respect for acknowledging the waiter but simply because he didn't want to share their lives with the waiter. She drunk the other half of her beer while the waiter was there and asked for another. They sat in silence, not eating until the waiter had returned and left again, she grabbed a wonton and just before eating it she asked.

"Do you still want to know where your name comes from?" she had asked Ast where his name came from on their first date and had felt him to be insensitive when he didn't return the question. He had told her that his dad had chosen the name but due to his untimely death and the lack of his mothers enquiry, his dad had taken the reasoning for Ast's name to his grave.

"No, I like pretending it had no reason to be chosen" he wasn't sure if he actually believed what he was saying or if he had deluded himself into believing it in order to live with the situation which he could no longer avoid. Ast realised just then that he had never asked his mother her reasons why she never asked his dad where the name came from. Ast wondered if he should ask her now, he hadn't spoken to her in over ten years since the start of his major depressive episode.

"Hmmm?"

"I like being a blank slate, I make the own meaning for my name and I fear I might be subconsciously influenced into playing out some story about my own existence if someone else had established a reason for my existence before I was born"

"You're particularly dramatic tonight" she teased before directing the conversation to more lighthearted topics where it remained for the rest of their dinner, they took a walk through a different park than Ast visited yesterday, saying very little throughout it and the rest of the way home.

When they returned to Ner's house they had another couple of beer's while listening to some new artist that she loved but didn't get too drunk, Ast dominated the conversation and among other things he told her about what went through his mind surrounding her in the last few days, how he went back and forth between convincing himself she hated him and that nothing was wrong, then everything was wrong etc., she didn't respond much to that except telling him that he is silly and overthinks things, if he was more perceptive he would have been able to tell that she found this topic along with his conversation dominating very unattractive and a mood spoiler for what had started as a nice night. He got a little offended but he was just happy that he felt things were now nice between them again, shortly after that he told her that he was heading home, intentionally trying to plant some seed in her mind that she had truly offended him, she didn't take this bait though as she had other issues and just wished him well and ended their night with a short but passionate kiss on the doorstep. He went home, masturbated to some depraved porn, and went straight to sleep.