fandomhighdorms | Fourth Floor Common Room; Saturday Evening.

Entry tags:

Fourth Floor Common Room; Saturday Evening.

His weekend, Cal decided, was just going to be full of new sorts of things, and he decided to stop being lazy in his room and go down to the common room to be lazy there. The common room had the added benefit of television, and he realized that he really hadn't bothered watching much modern TV.

...After a little while of flipping through the channels (after another while of trying to figure out the remote), Cal understood why he hadn't bothered. It was a weekend of new things, but he decided that watching TV wasn't one of them, and he soon turned it off, leaving for his room and coming back with a book and his script for the play to just do some good old reading.

[[ open as common rooms are! ]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I know," Cal stated, and then held up his book for Romeo to see. "I'm trying this crazy new thing, it's called reading. You should check it out; it's a real trip."

Romeo squinted at the book, swallowing his grin. "So those strange markings on the page talk to you? I've not heard of this; explain."

He located the cereal and poured it into a bowl.

After a moment of looking at Romeo and trying to decide if he was serious or not, Cal lifted a hand from his book to tap his forehead with a finger. "In here, man. The words talk to you in your head; that's what's so trippy about it."

Romeo wondered if Cal had thought he was serious; that was almost depressing, but more than possible at this school.

"So you look at the papers and you get voices in your head," he nodded. "And without pharmaceutical assistance."

"That is ... trippy." The slang was unfamiliar on his tongue.

Cal nodded, very sage-like. "Exactly. And the words, they make stories, about things. Sometimes, there's even pictures!"

Romeo made an impressed face, then looked for the milk. "Are there pictures in that one, then?"

Unable to maintain the sarcasm for too long, Cal let a slight chuckle escape him as he shook his head. "Regrettably? No."

"What is it, then?" Romeo queried, settling into a chair with his dinner.

Cal marked his page, folding it down in the corner in a way that used to drive his mother crazy, and then offered the script of Much Concern About Nothing over toward Romeo ~~because the mun is too brain dead to bother with picking out something else to read~~. "The play we're doing this time over at the Boards. I've actually got a good part of it already memorized, but it never hurts to go over it, especially since Tennant's a nightmare about asking questions about every little detail. I study more for that damn play that I do any of my classes."

"Shakespeare," Romeo said slowly, reading the proffered page. "It's odd, my brain turns to static when I try to read that for too long. It's part of why I didn't try out, though I did end up taking your part when you were, ah, indisposed."

"It doesn't sound like it's a decision I should regret." What Cal was describing sounded like work.

Cal tilted his head at Romeo. "You took up my part that night I turned into a hyena?"

"All ten lines before he died," he nodded. "Geoff dragged me to the theater and I decided to give it a go."

"The man's crazy," Cal said, but he grinned, "but that was cool of you filling in. I could have still done the death part, I think, but the lines would have been a little hard in that form."

Romeo shrugged. "I don't think I had much of a choice. There was a look in his eye," he said. "Though he could have cast all the other animals from that week, and called it an interpretation."

"Dojima," he added, "was a rabbit, if she hasn't told you that."

"...She mentioned it," Cal nodded a little, and then didn't say anything else on it, because that had been mentioned the night of the not-a-date.

"So how are your classes so far?"

"Academic," Romeo said. "I may have stretched myself, with physics and literature, and then demon hunting for practical use. And yours?"

There was a bit of a look for the phrase 'demon hunting for practical use,' but then Cal answered with a shrug. "Art, cooking, and a sex-ed class I didn't sign up for. They're okay. I think I might be awakening an inner artist in those first two."

And awakening only resentment in the last.

It was Fandom; demon hunting was among the most practical things offered in the course schedule. Romeo raised an eyebrow to match Cal's look.

"But there's no art to the sex ed class?" Sex was totally an art. Really.

"Not the way this guy teaches it," Cal said. "I mean, the first week, we make some sort of totems...I don't know, like fertility totems, or something, I wasn't paying enough attention...and then this week, it was pointing out all the parts of the reproductive system on models."

He twirled a very unenthusiastic finger in the air.

"I learned that shit when I was fourteen."

Granted, he'd learned it in a gender identity psychologists office because they were pointing out what was different about his, but he learned it all the same.

"That sounds as bad as learning it in Catholic school," Romeo decided. "Worse, even. The priests weren't so much for fertility totems, just the plastic models."

"It is just as bad," Cal agreed and, while Baker & Inglis wasn't Catholic, he had to imagine that a lot of the teaching was similar. Still, it wasn't as bad as getting your education on sex through pornographic videos. He smirked a little, faintly, distantly. "It's really a pointless class for me to be in, but I'm too lazy to really bother changing it."

"And if you did, you'd have to try to catch up for the missed weeks." Romeo shook his head. "Better to suffer through it. Maybe it won't be entirely pointless."

"That's what I'm hoping. Maybe, just maybe, something new might come out of it..."

But the lesson with the models and the utterly clear, cut-and-dry male-female approach made it profoundly clear that this was unlikely, as far as Cal was concerned.

"I'm not sure they've invented anything new, or nothing they'll tell us about in school," Romeo mused. "But hope is good. And at least it's only a little time every week."

That got a faint grin out of Cal, bemused and distant. "I'd be interested," he admitted, "in reading things about something new, though."

He remembered being a part of those sorts of studies...

(no subject)

withoutverona - 2008-09-14 02:28 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

not-a-mused.livejournal.com - 2008-09-14 02:33 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only