#skateghosted

               EVER SINCE THEY’D had the strange moment of realizing that they shared a birthday, Reggie had wanted to so something fun with Willie when the day arrived. — Which was a departure from his usual style of forgetting that he had a birthday until being reminded by Alex the day of, only to have no plans made and happily going with whatever his friends planned for him. But since he was a ghost, he wasn’t even sure what constituted something fun when someone else had been a ghost for longer than Reggie had even been alive. Do twenty-five years count if you can’t remember them passing? 

So he’d done the best he could with what he had, which was mostly nothing. He’d poofed closer to the beach to check to see if his favorite thrift store still existed, and seeing that it still stood, had asked Julie to make her way out of her neighborhood to the store, finding just the thing for his friend. 

                           — Were they friends? Reggie sure hoped they were. 

He smiled at Willie when he poofed into the skate park where Reggie was waiting. He wasn’t sure how Alex and Willie always found each other, but he’d asked Alex to pass along an invitation to hang out whenever he’d seen Willie, and Reggie was happy to see that the other ghost had gotten the invitation and had seen fit to answer. He stood with a small gift bag in his hands, holding it out in front of himself.

               CONSIDERING THEY DIDN’T really hang out a whole lot just the two of them, this had been a pretty weird request from Reggie. ... But then again, he reminded himself, Willie hadn’t had to say YES, but he had. 

And now they were standing in front of Reggie’s tombstone. Nothing says hey, I appreciate that you make one of my very best friends happy and would like to get to know you better like a field trip to a cemetery. 

He’d been wanting to visit his grave ever since he’d managed to track down which cemetery his parents had used. It wasn’t like there was any other family buried in LA for him to know, like, which plot they’d used, and to the best of his knowledge, they hadn’t even picked out their OWN plots yet. So it had taken a while, but now he’d found the place where he’d been buried, surrounded by names he didn’t know. 

The plot was simple, with no sign anyone had been there in a while other than the groundskeepers of the cemetery, and the stone showed some age. It wasn’t BRAND NEW.... it reminded him how much time had passed, even if it didn’t always feel like much had passed at all for him. 

REGINALD MICHAEL PETERS, the stone read. MARCH 5 1978 - JULY 25 1995. UNSER SOHN. He didn’t know if he’d expected anything else on there, but.... it was weird, seeing his name, seeing an end date to his life, especially since he was standing right there. 

He’d asked Willie because he didn’t want to be alone, but didn’t know how to share the moment with the guys. He couldn’t ask Julie — GOD, what would that conversation even look like? — and the only other person he knew was... Willie. And thank god Alex was seeing a guy who apparently had been Mother Teresa in another life, because now, Reggie wasn’t alone. 

@skateghosted​ asked :  “So... Valentine’s Day, huh?”

               HE HADN’T EVEN noticed when Willie had come into the studio, but that was surprising. When he wasn’t on wheels, Willie was, like, totally silent when he wanted to be. Reggie had his own theories about why that was ( his lead one being that a kid who was on his own a lot probably had to learn how to not get noticed ), but still, when he heard Willie’s voice behind him, his shoulders jumped a little and he immediately laughed at himself. 

“Dude, you should think about maybe being a spy or something after school,” he said. “They’d never be able to catch you! You’re like ninja-level quiet.” They were technically practicing still, but it had turned more into a jam sesh as they wrapped up their work. Reggie continued playing, adding a simple bassline to whatever pyrotechnics Luke was trying to musically set off in the garage as he meandered to Willie, a few steps closer.