fandomhighdorms | The Roof [Friday, Early Afternoon]

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The Roof [Friday, Early Afternoon]

Classes for the week all well over, and Effy not really being the sort to go for unnecessary work, especially with half term (spring break, whatever) coming up, was out getting her unwinding kicked off a little early.

Might be cold, but it was at least pretty and sunshiney and cold, and Effy was lost in thought and idly picking petals off her now wilting Valentine's day flowers, dropping them off the roof and watching them float down and away in the light breeze. Everyone relaxed in different ways, and Effy always had been... unconventional, to say the least.

This time in a couple days she'd be in the fucking Bahamas. That was a pretty good thing to be musing on, wasn't it? Especially since it was bloody freezing right here, right now.

[[Open roof is totally open, but work induced SP may occur.]]

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"It's cold up here," Jack observed as he wandered onto the roof for a smoke. He wasn't in any particular mood, except the mood of needing to be as distracted as possible. His sock drawer had rarely been cleaner.

"Hello."

Effy gave him a fleeting glance as she tugged another petal off that carnation she was fiddling with. "Very," she agreed. Which begged the question of why the hell she didn't wear more layers against this sort of thing.

"Alright, Jack?" she tacked on a moment later.

Not in particular, but ...

"I'm fine, just wishing we were on vacation already" he said, and squared his shoulders before smiling down at her flower. "So, does he love you or love you not?"

"They all love me," Effy said, smirking across at him briefly. Obviously. She'd say that, if she really believed it or not. "Not really keeping track."

She paused breifly to snag another flower and offer it out to him. "Want to try for yourself?"

He took it easily. "But they all love me, too," he returned, whether he meant it or not. "Not much of a challenge."

Though he did set his lighter back in his pocket and start picking off petals. Ah, therapeutic destruction.

"It's always a challenge," Effy corrected. Just not always in the ways you expected, or wanted it to be. "Be fucking dull if it wasn't."

"I meant the flower," Jack explained. "Though I agree with you about the other thing."

"Mmm." Secretly kind of envious of anyone who could find it simple, not that she'd admit as much.

"About to go away for a week," she noted, holding out a petal over the roof and just letting the breeze catch it from her hand. "It was either this, chuck 'em out, or come back to mouldy flowers." She'd managed to quash the initial idea of seeing how holding her lighter to them worked out.

"I was just going to stick mine in the bin," Jack shrugged. He wasn't sentimental. "Giving them back to the wind is prettier."

"You're going on the trip too?"

"What kind of freak turns down a free week in the sun to stay at school?" Effy tossed back.

That was a 'yes', unsurprisingly. But just saying that... wasn't really in her.

"The kind of freak who wants to just go home and not deal with anything unfamiliar for a few days," Jack said, not terribly offended. "I've skipped the other school trips, but I'm making an exception."

It was his last one, after all.

Lucky he wasn't offended, really, because Effy wasn't the sort to backtrack from a statement lie that.

"What's different?"

"Last one," Jack said. "And the others were to the middle of the woods, which doesn't interest me, and New York, where I've been anyhow."

He ran a hand through his curls. "Mostly it was the 'last one' bit."

"Ah." Effy quirked a slight smile. "Nostalgia." Made sense.

"Not looking forward to escaping mandatory education?" Just a sense she was getting.

"Nostalgia for a place I've never been," Jack nodded, and shrugged. "Yes and no? I feel like I just figured out how to be here, and now it's almost over. It's disorienting."

Ironic, too, since he'd arrived in Fandom counting the days until he was eighteen. But there it was.

"Bit like going backwards," she commented thoughtfully, pausing from her ritual flower destruction and just twirling the stem between her fingers. "Going home where you came from is, after here."

"Got family back there?"

"A sister." Wow, that was still new to say. "And my guardian. But I'm still trying to sort out a way to stay in this time, maybe. I like it here -- and it would be going backward."

Edited 2010-02-20 02:52 (UTC)

"There an actual plan there?" Effy wondered, grabbing her question asking role and holding onto it. All the less she had to share herself.

"A few of them." Which .... weren't working out terribly well, since his modern ID came courtesy Chuck Bass and he'd missed the qualifying exams for university anyhow. There was a way around, he knew it; he just wasn't sure what it was.

None of which he wanted to explain, since it all made him feel stupid.

"And you have another year here, don't you?"

Effy nodded once, tapping her flower idly against her palm. No, she had no idea what she was doing after all this either. Tried quite hard not to think about it too hard, actually.

Pretty sure further education wasn't her thing. It wasn't even that she wasn't bright enough, just... Didn't feel right.

"Sure someone'll try and plan my future for me before then." Every school had career councellors of some kind, right? And she'd ignore them.

Francine was the one who was running all around the room frantically trying to remember everything she needed to pack; Katchoo was the one who just peered at a pile of clothes until she'd gotten a vague sense of which things were clean (or clean enough), tossed all the cleanish stuff in a bag or two, crammed in toiletries as an afterthought, and called it good.

So she was long since done with packing for their trip, and in the mood for a smoke. Or ten. Up to the roof it was, then, preceded by the tiny scraping noise of the flint wheel on the lighter she was fiddling with as she shoved the door open and stepped out.

"Effy," she drawled, nodding once before one side of her mouth twisted slightly in amusement at the methodical flower-mangling; it had been a long time since they'd talked, but she didn't forget names when people left an impression on her. "I didn't peg you for the playground fortune-telling type."

It said something about Effy that the idea of playground 'does he love me' games barely entered her mind during this activity. "Can't just be destroying things for the sake of it?" she asked, pausing to glance over her shoulder at Katchoo. Random idle destruction was more her style.

Yeah, Katchoo would actually have been surprised if those games had even been a remote possibility here. She rooted around in her inside jacket pocket until she could fumble a cigarette out of the pack -- it took a little maneuvering to do that without breaking it en route -- and blew out a loud puff of air, dropping down to sit on the edge of the roof.

"Never said that, did I?" She lit the cigarette and set the lighter down beside her, taking a long drag before exhaling. "Reasons are overrated," she added, twitching her hands to shake her jacket cuffs further down over her wrists. Totally innocent gesture, really. Nothing to hide there.

"Agreed." Effy watched her a moment longer, even if she had taken in the little motion, she wasn't about to show it. Tiny pieces like that tended to get tucked away into her mind to be put together with several other tiny pieces of information until they made complete sense."People are a bit stuck on them," she said, eyes darting away towards the distant mainland.

"So, what did you peg me as?" she wondered, jumping back to that statement, and pulling her gaze back towards the other girl. Honestly, she was just curious.

"Just a bit?" Katchoo scoffed. Another long drag and exhale, watching until the smoke dissipated, and she turned to look at Effy, her gaze flicking toward the flowers on the way. Managing that combination of detached and scrutinizing was a technique she couldn't have explained, really, or more to the point wasn't about to explain.

She had her tendencies toward quiet observation, too. Limited in this case, but still.

"Somebody who likes making sure people have a hard time doing that."

She didn't really sound like she disapproved. At all.

"More fun to keep people guessing," she said, shrugging. "For everyone involved." Found it kept people coming back, too.

"Everyone loves a bit of a puzzle."

"They're suckers that way." Katchoo allowed a faint smirk for a moment. "What was the line? Make 'em beg for more and don't give it to 'em? Gypsy Rose Lee was onto something there."

Not recognising the line wouldn't stop Effy from completely agreeing with the sentiment.

"One you live by too?" she guessed, systematically destroying a single petal. "Not exactly an open book."

"Nah. I'd rather keep 'em away." The next drag was a long one, burning the cigarette to the halfway point; Katchoo took her time exhaling, too, focusing the smoke into a thin stream . . . though the effect was ruined in the cold air by her fogging breath.

Still, that question confirmed a guess. "Doesn't stop 'em though. Never does."

"Depends who it is." Effy was perfectly content to keep the right people around, it just took a while before she let down the aloof facade enough to make it obvious. "Bit shit if you keep them all away."

People needed to have a bit of perseverance to get anywhere her, since she didn't often put in much effort in herself.

"Not all. Just most." Did being in love with her best friend since they were twelve count as perseverance? Because if so, Katchoo had it. "Couple 'cause they're worth it, couple 'cause they wouldn't leave me the hell alone."

And she was grateful for it. Just not saying so.

Effy huffed a laugh. "Yeah. Know the feeling." Panda had been one of those, after all. Clingy and persistent and then ended up unexpectedly growing on her in her special way. Hard to push away.

"Surprising number of those second ones around." Usually turned out that those slotted into the first category after a while.

That hadn't so much been the case with Francine -- Katchoo had latched onto her first -- but there was some similarity there, with her taking the uncertain second to Katchoo's alpha role.

. . . they'd probably love each other.

"Really are, for such a tiny island," Katchoo agreed. "Gonna have to beat 'em off with sticks soon."

Or not. Because those people for her had slipped sideways into the first category too.

"Don't think that'd deter them." Not really.

"But generally," she noted, looking around, "they don't come up here." Which made it a great place to hide out the way.

"Heh. Doubt it. Still, a popular spot for all of us who like to hide out here," Katchoo concluded. "Must be the nice smoky atmosphere."

Jack nodded a brief greeting to Katina. He wasn't sure he'd ever spoken to her directly, but she had left an impression even from across a room -- and the roof was only so big, anyhow.

"Don't we all want to look into the future once in a while?"

"Who doesn't want to know how it's all going to turn out sometimes? Or might?" That was more matter-of-fact than sarcastic; those long and astoundingly verbose internal rhapsodies of hers had been filed under Futile Wishful Thinking forever, and now they'd snuck into the realm of possibility, and it was a little bit stunning to realize.

Then again, on the other hand, there was the memory of Francine looking into the mirror the night she'd gotten that white streak in her hair, and Katchoo flicked the ash off her cigarette, watching it drift away over the edge of the building. "But you know what they say about being careful what you wish for."

"True," Jack said, more thoughtfully than he'd intended; he'd expected a flippant answer, and now he had to redirect himself to consider the question.

"I'm sure there are things I'm happier not knowing. Though -- if you knew you could prepare and change them, couldn't you?"

Jack refused to admit there were things you couldn't prepare for.

"Sure." Katchoo, who wasn't big on preparation personally, shrugged. "You're screwing yourself out of a lot if you get fixated on what's supposed to happen someday."

Case in point, all those clocks she'd broken.

"Destiny's a load of bull anyway, if you ask me."

"I don't believe in it," Jack responded. "It's always seemed ludicrous to me, too."

Katchoo, taking another drag, watched the cigarette burn down a little more and nodded as she exhaled. "More into making your own, then?"

Jack nodded back at her. "Yeah. You're the same?"

"Pretty much," she agreed. Not entirely accurate -- she did get locked in on inevitabilities sometimes, but she figured the statement left her some wiggle room for the things she wasn't going to mention. "Y'know, I kinda figured. Noticed you weren't big into labels at the meeting last week."

"It's just annoying," Jack confirmed, perking up a bit. "The only names at home are rude ones. I know it's different here, but ..." He scrunched his nose. Old distastes died hard, apparently.

"At least I didn't say I don't like anyone." He was teasing her, but he was also curious.

"Yeah, and the names aren't much better now, depending," Katchoo answered, but her face and voice went a touch more guarded now. "Why sugarcoat it? It's the frikkin' truth."

"I'm not asking you to sugarcoat it," Jack said mildly. "Just -- taking note. You can not like men all you want, as long as you don't drop me off the roof for talking to you."

Edited 2010-02-19 21:18 (UTC)

She'd have been more thrown by a reaction that wasn't shock or offense a year or so ago, but now, with plenty of experience in putting up with Arthur under her belt? Katchoo just half-huffed, half-snorted a laugh. "Nah. Jail isn't worth half a second of satisfaction."

"I'd take longer than half a second to fall," Jack returned. He didn't get shocked or offended easily as long as nothing personal was at stake, and nothing was.

Besides, he always liked to make someone laugh.

And it was easier to make her laugh, these days. God, she'd gone soft, because there it was again, a tiny snort that actually had humor behind it.

"The satisfaction doesn't start until impact."

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The Roof [Friday, Early Afternoon]

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