fandomhighdorms | The Roof; Sunday Evening.

There were two reasons why Cal was currently sitting on the roof of the building, slowly drawing in the smoke and tobacco and cancer of a menthol cigarette. The first had to do with the tiny little albino monkeys, two of which were currently still occasionally hopping up on his knees, chittering something, and tilting their heads at him before scattered off for a little longer. Not the monkeys themselves; for the most part, they hadn't actually surprised Cal too much when he woke up and saw them. When he woke up and saw them, however, they had gotten a hold of the pages he had typed up yesterday and planned to burn today. What pages weren't being wrinkled or torn or nibbled on were being carefully thrown around, like ticker tape at a parade, or, as Cal dreaded, being carted off to God knows where. So his morning and his afternoon had been spent trying to reclaim what was his from their little primate clutches and send them to the originally intended fate, hoping that whatever was slipped out of the room, pillaged away by the monkeys, was nothing too incriminating.

The second reason was the residual, remaining effects of the contents of the pages in the first place. He'd hoped that writing about it and then sleeping on it would have allowed it to fade, but it didn't. Not even after chasing monkeys. And so he gave in, went outside, and had a smoke, and then decided that the view was too nice and he was too lazy, to bother with doing anything else.

[[ damn, I'm all poetical and whatnot tonight. Either way, open roof is open! ]]

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The comparison got a light chuckle. "Or drunks," Cal added.

"I w-wouldn't really know," she admitted. "N-Not much experience with e-either."

"Consider yourself lucky, then," Cal commented with a nod, although, really, he had no experience with small children, either. He had had to deal with drunks before, though, although these weren't the happy hyper, quick-to-crash drunks he was referring to at all.

That got a mildly curious glance at him. "O-Oh? Y-You've experience then?"

"Uhhh...with drunks," Cal allowed. "Not so much with little kids, thankfully."

He didn't imagine he'd be very good with them, especially since children had the uncanny habit, out of their innocence of freedom and society-placed taboos, of noticing things that older people wished they wouldn't and, in Cal's case, that could be...extremely awkward.

She nodded. "I'm the o-opposite," she offered. "I h-have a younger s-sister and there were y-younger children at the Academy as w-well."

"See, I'm the younger sibling," Cal explained with a light smile, another drag, "and my cousins were all about the same general age."

"D-Do you get a-along with your siblings?" she wondered idly. She didn't after all, though she wished she did.

Cal couldn't help smile a little distantly at that. "Yeah. He made fun of me a lot when we were little, but...but we're cool now."

Which was an understatement. Chapter Eleven's handling of the...change...was one of the things that helped build his confidence about it enough, really.

"I'm g-glad that things are good between t-the two of you," she said, sounding a little wistful.

Cal's head tilted thoughtfully at the tone of Hinata's voice; he tapped a little ash from the end of his cigarette before asking, "Not so much with you and yours?"

"I-It would probably b-be better if I w-wasn't the eldest," she said, glancing out at the grounds. "B-But there's n-nothing I can do to change t-that."

Cal took a moment to consider the long laundry list of accomplishments that Chapter Eleven had failed to achieve in his short lifetime.

"You think it's harder to be the eldest?" he asked, his tone curious, wondering.

"H-Hanabi is b-better suited to be the f-future leader of our C-Clan," Hinata tried to explain. "A-And she's more t-talented at our f-family's t-techniques. B-But I'm the o-one that's H-Heir."

Cal grinned a little more. "Yeah?" he said, a questioning tone. "It's the same in our family. My brother got the family business because he's older, but he's doing a shit job. Not that I'd think you'd do a shit job, but, I mean, if even you think your sister would do better..."

She looked down and shrugged a little. "F-Father says Hanabi would d-do better."

Cal frowned a little at that. "Do you think she would?"

That got another shrug, a bit rueful. "H-Hanabi is m-more confident than I a-am."

"Yeah, but...isn't confidence, like....one quality out of maybe a million that a leader should have?" Cal proposed; he snorted a little. "Hell, my brother's infinitely more confident than I've ever been, and he's running the company to the ground."

"F-Father favours her," Hinata said quietly. "A-And he k-knows what it takes to b-be a good leader."

Cal shrugged a little. "You said you're heir, though, right? Does that mean you'll still get it?"

"A-As of now, yes," she said. "I-It'd be breaking t-tradition if the f-first born didn't l-lead."

"Well," Cal ruminated carefully, "then you could either, you know...break tradition, or just do the best damn job you can. If that's what you want to do."

"I d-don't go b-back on my w-word," Hinata said simply. "B-But I d-don't w-want the Clan to s-suffer if I prove i-incapable."

Cal certainly didn't know anything about clan dynamics outside of the Stephanides clan, but...

"Joint ruling, maybe?"

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