9:34 am

Lisa.

"…Mr. Burglar, if you weren't helping me, what would you have like doing during these ending times?" Aurora blurted out. Tired of stillness maybe?

"What would I've like doing? ...Getting drunk most likely, maybe even doing nasty things I'm not really proud to have thought of."

"Oh, the burglar shows his real colors! I'm not the only bad guy here," I replied.

"To think and to do are different."

"…But would you do it?" Aurora asked again.

"Honestly? …I'm not even sure. I'm somewhat weak-minded, so what I do ends up being weak-done. Point is, even if I wanted to, I would fail, and even if I succeeded, I would regret. That's most likely why I helped you, Aurora."

Aurora and I both raised our eyebrows a bit. Did that even reply the why?

"Come on, Mr. Burglar," I started, "isn't there something—something not nasty—you would've liked doing?"

"I did do things I would've liked to do with Aurora," I frowned at him, "bad phrasing… I meant, stealing bunch of things without consequences was pretty fun, and I liked it."

"Aren't you just kleptomaniac?" I joked.

"No, nothing like that," he laughed off. "It's like you own everything, everything is your property. …Though, there's something I would've like to do. Actually, I wanted to do it since I was a kid but I gave up as soon as I understood how stupid it was."

"…Like touching the sky?" Aurora added.

"Something related. So," he collected his thoughts together, "one day, our teacher showed us one of these tornado-hunter shows. By the end of it, most boys in my class were all going 'wow!' and most were also going 'I wanna do that when I'm grown-up'. But I didn't think same—rather, I wanted to hunt something else—clouds. It really struck me how amazing, how shapeless, how beautiful clouds were; just—how could something so mundane and tame and soft like a cloud could shift into a tornado? I forgot about that dream of mine, but around the last year of high school, I'd skip class a lot. During these absurd days of freedom, somehow, it just sprang back in my mind like today; I started doing researches and I grabbed a notebook to sketch clouds in it and I'd make an escape every now and then to hunt them down. The notebook also served as a diary, and even if I stopped sketching and forgot all about it, you can guess I still have that habit of recording everything."

There was a huge smile on Aurora's face when he finished. And for some time, Mr. Burglar eyes were no longer fixed on the road, but up on the clouds.

It's not a bad dream. I would've liked doing that during these ending times.