shadows_have_offended | Que sera, sera - whatever will be will be

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Que sera, sera - whatever will be will be

The news took a while to settle and, honestly, Neil still isn't entirely sure what to do with the knowledge. He's a college student now--or, rather, will be in September. He doesn't sign up for classes for months yet, but he's already looked over the catalog at least three times, trying to think what he'd like to do, now that he knows what he wants to do. It's all a huge relief, in a way. Maybe he can do Shakespeare in the Park again this summer. Maybe things will start to shape up more brightly.

In any case, he's celebrating. He sent out texts to all his friends, promising music and drinks and food--and a dog--to be shared by all. He tidied up a little, even, not that his apartment is ever very out of order in the first place. He doesn't really know how to decorate for a party like this, so he doesn't bother. Just makes sure there's lots of food and that the drinks are neatly arranged and that Beau's crate is set up in the bedroom, covered but open, so he can disappear if he'd like to.

He's not sure who all will come, but that doesn't really matter. He's just excited that he got in. It's the next step in his life, and it's his own step. That deserves to be celebrated no matter what.

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He didn't...not get invited. He got invited by a friend of a friend and Neil knows him and it's a party, so it's not like Nova is unwelcome here. But the second he gets in the door, Nova realizes that most everyone here skews older and a little more proper than he is and he feels like he should be delivering a cake from his grandma's bakery instead of a guest.

The dog is a relief. Nova's always liked animals and he's always had a way with them. Probably, he ought to say hi, put on the charm, and act like he belongs here, but first...The dog.

"Hey buddy," he says, crouching down and offering a hand to smell.

Neil's a little surprised to see Nova. Not upset--definitely not upset, he's queer and Nova's blisteringly attractive--but a little surprised nonetheless. He's sure Nova knows somebody, and they were friendly at the Valentines party.

And, it appears, he likes dogs. Beau rolls over indulgently after getting a smell of Nova's hand, and Neil can't help but smile.

He approaches within Nova's line of sight. "He's a sucker," he reports. He doesn't explain Beau's origins, the complicated and heartaching path that got him to Neil. "Can I get you a drink?"

"You describing me or him?" Nova asks. He swears it's got to be a stereotype, hood-looking boys like him and pit bulls. How the dog ended up in Neil's care, though, that's got to be a story. Nova hesitates for a moment, because first he's got a dog belly to rub, and then nods.

"Yeah, drink'd be good."

"Both maybe," Neil says, voice and eyes kind. If he thinks anything of the look of them, he doesn't say so. Instead, he makes a gesture like wait here and ducks into the kitchen, which is just around the kitchen from where Beau has stationed himself for ideal attention seeking.

"What's your poison," he asks. "I have just about everything."

"Lady Lunes' rose punch," Nova says. He grins, knowing that there's no possible way Neil will have that in his 'everything.' Even if Neil could make rose punch, it wouldn't be Lady's. Like everything about Brooklyn's Alta Bruja, no one does it quite like Lady. "Nah, whatever's cold."

Neil rolls his eyes and obligingly flips Nova the bird with a boyish grin. He doesn't even know what that is, and he's not about to ask now. But at the request for cold, Neil goes into the fridge and pulls out two beers, popping the tops off before stepping back out.

He hands one of them to Nova with a bit of a small. Beau sits up at least a little and licks Neil's fingers, and then lays back down to look at Nova like he's never been so adored in his whole life.

"Didn't know you had it in you," Nova says, returning the gesture in a friendly manner. He's perfectly aware that rich kids from boarding schools know a thing or two about cursing but it's sort of impressive coming from someone so practiced at looking earnest.

Grinning down at the dog, Nova gives him a scratch behind the ears. "At least I found a date for the party." He can see why people like dogs so much.

"There's a lot you don't know about me," Neil says with put-on primness, the sort of teasing and joking he and Charlie used to do a lot of. The difference, of course, is that Charlie knew him from the time they came to Welton, and Nova really doesn't know him from Adam.

He smiles, though, at Nova doting on Beau--and Beau clearly leaning into it, not just because he likes the attention but because, like with Neil, he must sense something there. "He's certainly a good one."

Neil sips his beer idly and then says, "He belonged to some friends, before they disappeared."

Neil's face is neutral about it but it's an expression that has a similar lineage to the neutral faces he saw in his neighborhood and in juvie. Everyone knows someone who's died or vanished or else they've been the cause of that death. Nova doesn't say anything, but he gets it.

"I keep hearing stories like that," he says. "Everyone's lost someone."

Neil, for his part, has lost a lot of someones. Almost all of them were here when he arrived, and now only one of them is. He makes good strides at new friends. Hopefully college will help with that. He's got no way of knowing, though, and that's the scary thing.

"I hate to say it's something you get used to," he says with a shrug. "Each one's hard. You just hope they go back to something better, I suppose."

He knows some of them haven't.

"You don't get used to it. You get numb," Nova says. Philosophy isn't exactly his strong suit but it's experience talking. It doesn't make the grief any less real, it just means you can live from day to day without crumbling. "Isn't the same. But I get it."

For boys like Noveno Santiago, death is an old friend.

Neil nods a little bit because ain't it the truth. He hopes, back in Vermont, that everyone got to a place of numbness about him, that they went on and went out and got away from their stern fathers and distant mothers and the brothers they were so often compared to, if they had them.

He smiles, trying to banish the thoughts and return to the warm, happy mood of the party.

"Well, look at me go. Killing the buzz of my own party in one shot. That's a new record for me, too. Normally it takes me an hour or so."

Nova thinks of Alex's Death Day and her own attempts to sabotage it. As if he wouldn't have already done enough damage himself with his stupid canto and stupid contract. "Trust me, I've seen someone really kill the buzz at a party. This is nothing."

And it seems to him that no matter how much a person does or doesn't like being in Darrow, loss is just part of the experience. Even the people who claim to be happy here always have that little edge, the way their words fade out on a 'but...'

It's life.

Rosie hadn't seen Nova since New Year's. Or more precisely, since the morning after, when she'd awoken in a borrowed t-shirt and sweatpants on a slightly lumpy couch, still unable to believe the course her evening had taken after the clock struck midnight. It hadn't been intentional; she'd even stopped by a few days later with a note of thanks and an Ahab's gift card, pushing both under his front door when her knock went unanswered.

She just hadn't known what, if anything, to say to a boy when you didn't know them terribly well and yet had spent the night (innocent and blameless as it was) at their house.

Seeing him here at Neil's, Rosie's struck with that same uncertainty. Still, she makes her way over to him, smiling a bit as she hears the softer tones he's directing at the dog. "His name's Beau," she says. "Although if you know Neil, you might've already known that."

Probably, Nova should have said thanks for the gift card–which he'd used on the most complicated, over-the-top dessert drink he could get. He didn't have her number but there are plenty of people they both know from the Children's Home who could have given it to him. Mostly, he'd told himself it wasn't worth the trouble.

"I only know Neil a little. Heard about this party through someone who knows him. Figure I'd spice it up by crashing it." Not that he's exactly causing a scene over here, hanging out with Beau.

Rosie's not certain staying in one corner of a party with a dog is necessarily indicative of party crashing, but she thinks she understands the impulse to cast it as something more than it is. She'd done the same--or nearly so--at Lady Catherine's, moving through the party with a confidence she hadn't felt, allowing people to think what they would of who she was and her place in the world.

"Well," she says, looking down as Beau nudges his large, blocky head against Nova's dark fingers, "you've certainly brightened Beau's evening already."

The dog is probably a bad judge of character if he's already taken to Nova but he can't exactly say he minds. It's been ages since he got to hang out with an animal that wasn't trying to fight him over some food. He still kind of misses that cat he found when he was squatting in Red Hook. They'd had mad hangs while he slept there.

"He's the chillest dude here." Not that the party's exactly raging, but Nova doesn't know most of the people here.

"He's trained that way, I think; the person who owned him before Neil used him as some kind of...support animal, I think he said. Like a guide dog for the blind, but psychological. Not that you'd need him for that, or..." Rosie blushes, feeling a bit like she'd said something wrong without even meaning to. Just as she did usually, really--and so often in conversation with people she'd like to know a bit better.

"Please ignore me, I'm forever saying things I shouldn't."

Nova laughs at that, though not in a cruel way. He'd have to be stupid or in denial not to know how fucked up and broken he is. Some people get fucked up beyond repair and some people, like him, are held together with duct tape and spite. Maybe he does need a companion but he can also get by without.

"I already know I'm messed up, don't worry," he says.

"I don't think you're messed up at all." It's another thing she says without thought, though she doesn't find herself regretting it at all. "Maybe I don't know you very well, and maybe I'm wrong, but you were nicer to me on New Years than you needed to be. I don't think that's what someone messed up would do."

Her awkward and unprompted speech over with, Rosie just stands there for a moment, looking at both Nova and the dog and uncertain what--if anything--more there is to say.

"You can be messed up and still nice," Nova says, not cruelly. There are different kinds of fucked up and different ways to live from it. For so long, his life has been about desperate survival that he forgot how to be a decent human. He's working on that now, with whatever time he's got left to make things right.

"Appreciate the faith though."

"Of course," she says, to both his statements at once. It's a gentle chastisement, but a chastisement all the same, and for a moment it feels as though she's trodden onto unstable ground yet again. Nova's right, though; there were plenty of people in the world that were both. Possibly everybody, at one time or another.

"I was going to get something to eat," she says, looking across Neil's living room to a table with various trays of snacks and deli sandwiches. "Would you like to join me? Unless you're having a better time with Beau." Rosie wouldn't blame Nova if he was. At least the dog wasn't capable of saying anything stupid and regrettable within ten minutes of starting a conversation.

"Not looking for an apology," Nova says, catching the change in her face. Probably, it should annoy him. Rosie's got the kind of worldview that suggests a level of privilege and shelter far above his own. If he walked past her in New York, he'd probably be dismissive as hell. He can only place his expanded worldview on Darrow, maybe.

"Hard call," he says. "Dog or food." Nova gets up and makes to follow her.

"Always food."

Leaving Beau on his own--if not for long, given the rapidity with which the dog finds another partygoer to scratch his ears and rub his belly--they cut through the party together in a silence that's neither entirely companionable nor completely frosty. His strange magical powers aside, Nova would've been as ill-suited to her old life in Oxford as Rosie would have been to his in New York, and maybe that was the main part of how off-balance it felt seeing him again. But they were here now, both equally trapped in the city and far from the places and circumstances that they'd once found so familiar; it felt as though that had to matter on some level, had to explain how nice he'd been last time in a way he hadn't needed to be.

At least, Rosie thought it should.

It isn't until after they've both picked up their little paper plates and started loading them up with crudités and tiny blocks of cheese that Rosie speaks again. "What are you looking for, then?" she asks. "Not an apology, fine; certainly not pity, I don't doubt you'd laugh at anyone who tried. But if not those...then what?"

"Not sure I'm looking for anything," he admits. Nova goes for the cheese and little salami slices more than he does the vegetables. Probably not exactly healthy but what's the worst it can do, kill him faster? "Just trying to be realistic about who I am." Rosie seems sweet; he'd hate to disappoint her when she realizes how far he's been from a good person. How far he still is.

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