as_damaged | ☎ voicemail [v 2.0]

[What's wrong with bowling he goes with his friends all the time.]

I can teach you.

[See? Romance. And a little clear of his throat as he falls silent, leaning his cheek into her hair.]

[Learning to bowl is obviously the foundation of every long-term relationship. Allison lets her eyes flutter shut, leaning into him much more easily now that she doesn't have to juggle eye contact and body language and where her feet go all at once. It's comfortable.]

We could try it, once,

[she concedes, her sly smile hidden somewhere in the hollow of his neck. Once suggests more than once, or at least, the possibility thereof. She's getting ahead of herself, but in the moment it's nice to indulge in the daydream of some nebulous future with a boy she still barely knows.]

Since we'll both be in town.

[Something he could almost be glad of, now, even if 'once' is just that. He's not planning futures, just a next time. Then, quiet again, because he doesn't want her to move from that spot, where her breath tickles against the collar of his shirt. It might be the best feeling he can think of.]

Mmn.

[She doesn't quite answer, just a quiet hum of agreement. Once is a start. She can live with that. This is a start, one she's enjoyed more than she expected, considering the rarity of her impulsiveness (not that she hadn't noticed him before, so perhaps it doesn't count. But she's never asked anyone to ask her out quite like this.)

It's a childish impulse, to want to freeze a moment forever. From a certain perspective it's funny; when midnight hits and they become who they are, perhaps it's close enough. Certainly it won't end in any of the ways she might guess.]

[It will end, rather, with strips of glittering tickertape getting caught in his hair, at exactly the moment that, having brushed his lips against her forehead as the call for the end of the night went up, he ducks his head a little lower and catches her eyes, a question in mind that he doesn't know how to voice.]

[Finding words never works, in any world or at any age. When she looks up to meet his gaze her eyes are wide and unguarded; she lifts her chin, slightly. It's an answer of sorts, for a question unasked.

The fingers on his shoulder brush a little closer to his throat, to curl around the back of his neck, perhaps. If she can make herself so bold. If he moves nearer. If.]

[If. The game of hesitating moves falls back to his turn and his throat catches around and attempt to swallow. there's no good looking round to see if everyone's stopped dancing, now, if they're all looking. Somehow it feels certain that they are. This is some kind of monumental thing. Like the moon landing.

He gasps, air breaking through the tightness in his throat, and closes his eyes tightly in the instant

that he darts in to kiss her.]

[Midnight always hits hard, after a curse like this; it's ice-water unfamiliarity, a rush of vertiginous disorientation. If she hadn't shut her eyes as well, maybe she'd pull away; but she doesn't, just tenses slightly in his arms as the situation takes some sort of shape in her mind. He's familiar. Grounding. Here, he always has been; and even if she feels sometimes like she hardly knows him, right now she knows this. (How could she not?) She'd know him in the dark.

This is, she knows, not quite right (though she wishes it could be, will never say as much,) but it's a safe starting place to put the pieces together. Slowly, the fingers clutching his neck unfurl, permission to pull back from her if he needs to.

They really, probably, ought to stop. She knows.]

[He feels it too. The disconnect from a sure and certain reality as new-old memories rush in to reveal the deception and make this existence a memory too. Ice-water is a fair analogy. The last time he felt this he'd been trying, failing to keep his head above the frozen sea.

This time realisation dawns with a hot flush (and it's not the first time this weekend he's felt the sensation creeping up the back of his neck, but before that it was something he'd - largely - gotten over by the age of nineteen). Her hands unclasp their hold on him and his, locked to her waist, for a moment grip tighter. Just for a second more. Just to finish this one thing and let some kid he'd never quite been get it right.

It's chaste by adult standards, but not dispassionate for it.

He really, probably, should have taken the chance to pull away. Instead he pulls back perhaps the breadth of a breath and opens his eyes.]

[Perhaps the fact that both of them ought to know better means the double trespass can be forgiven without discussion. She knows too much of where they've been, not enough of where they stand now; doesn't even quite know what principle she's standing for when she keeps her distance and her quiet. The stubborn truth is, as much as she hates the City's manipulations and machinations, as much as she resents the circumstances that toss them together and drag them apart, she doesn't mind being here. Now. Maybe he has a point after all; hypnotic suggestion can't make you do anything you really don't want to do. But, probably, it's infinitely more complicated than that.

He's already looking at her when she opens her eyes. What does one say? If neither of them objects (does he? she wonders,) do they owe apologies?]

You've got glitter in your hair.

[He lets go of one hand's grip around her and smooths it back through his hair, catching a crackling foil strip and gold dust that gleams between his finger and thumb when he brings them down and rubs them together.]

So have you.

[An apology would probably be the worst thing he could think of - so he's prepared for her to make one. At the same time, a small smile keeps to the corners of his mouth.]

If this were really my old school there'd be a nun ready to smack us for impropriety right about now.

[And he looks round long enough to see all the others in the same state of confusion and disarray, adults on the kind of outfits they might not even have dreamed of as kids.]

I think the City means for us to smack ourselves.

[Or one another; she knows it wouldn't be the first time, from hearsay if not experience. Even now the angry hum of voices and the occasional surprised yelp suggests not everyone is pleased with their younger counterparts' decisions.

She doesn't brush a hand through her hair-- just shakes her head very slightly, jarring a little shower of glimmer over her shoulders. She doesn't pull away, and it's not quite an apology. It's a matter of purposeful stubbornness.]

Wouldn't be the first time.

[And there's something in the way he keeps his focus on her that doesn't make it look like he means the city at all. God knows they can make missteps of their own devices.

He looks down - by some miracle of physics the clothes still fit even if the styling is a few years younger than what might be standard. They don't look so out of place as the kid whose mother sent him in powder blue, or all the girls wearing puffballs. They could be out for the evening like this, no one would look twice. So.]

Do you want to go for a drink?

[There's the slightest tilt of her head, the look she always gets when she's running that sort of question through the labyrinthine and ever-shifting rules that govern the answers. She isn't, though; not exactly, and the edges of her eyes crinkle a little.

She's thinking that it would have been a commonplace question, once upon a time. That it isn't, now, which means the rules (as they ought to stand, as they still do in the back of her mind,) don't apply.]

Unless you know a bowling alley that'd be open.

[The words tease a smile out onto her lips. Maybe a drink is a start. Maybe-- maybe, that's all right?]

[He wrinkles his nose, failing to hide the returned smile of his own when he shakes his head at the idea.]

No. Not now I know how bad you are.

[And that seems like the right, natural opportunity to duck away from her without it being a parting - the end of anything. As soon as he has, there's an arm held out in it's stead.]

Besides, we should take the chance while we won't get carded.

Oh.

[Mock offense, and she leans back with it as he pulls away, silently grateful for the grace of the transition. She's never known how to say not yet without it coming out as not ever, after all, but she doesn't want to say no. She wants a little distance. A little time. Always a little more than is given, but one problem at a time. She takes his arm, and thinks fleetingly of moon landings and microwave pizza.]

Good point, you never know how long that will last.

[It's a rare chance, before too much of this world and the real one has time to rebuild itself as a barrier to why this shouldn't (why it can't) be easy. There's just a enough of the teenage fairytale left in the glitter in his hair, on her shoulders, to make the precursor here why not instead of but if.

He's lived with secrets for as long as he can remember. This weekend has only been a reminder of that. But the ones he kept as a child are old to him now, they're easier to bare.

There have been people in his life he's shared them with. And one of them is walking on his arm, and for a little while nothing can seem wrong with the idea that it's where she should be.]

They could drop us into something better than exam week, next time. I get enough late nights reading paperwork on the job.

And we'll never even find out whether it was worth losing all that sleep.

[A night stolen from the City is worth it, though, she thinks. Once-- after he'd left her and before he'd left-- she'd wanted something very like this, some semblance of a second chance without all the City's baggage. You can't always-- maybe can't ever-- get what you want.

But you get something. Maybe if you're careful, you can keep it.]

Are you serious? You got an A.

[There were the kids who'd beat themselves up for achieving anything less, and the kids who were only worried about what their parents would think. Here the latter leads the former, not quite deliberately slipping into a kind of fantasised reminiscence, but still keeping the present well out.]

Maybe I got an A plus.

[And perhaps deliberately provoking a swat in his direction.]

[No swat, a full on shoulder bump. She manages not to stumble, executing a careful series of short steps in the unfamiliar low heels she'd picked up from... well, wherever.]

Not a chance, the TA's would have marked you down for making fun of them.

[It's never this easy, never could be, as far as she knows. But she likes it.]

☎ voicemail [v 2.0]

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden

→ we are not what you think we are we are golden