fandomhighdorms | The Roof [Thursday evening]

So. She was really, obviously,stupid to think that things would be different here, right? Like...she could just have friends here, and be happy, and oh, god, last week she'd had a party and people had come and no one had made fun of her or paid her at all, and she had a homecoming date, and --

Well. Probably not, anymore. Olive was back to feeling just as ostracized as she had back in Ojai. And it wasn't even that she was embarrassed about what she'd done -- that was a little bit of it, sure. But the reason she was up here on the roof, crying, her knees tucked up to her chest -- and crap, now the cliches were following her, too -- was that she'd gotten used to things just being...normal here. And now the whole thing had followed her after all, and there was a common room of people she actually cared about laughing at her all trussed up in lingerie, who all knew about all of the lying.

So, yeah. Cliche or not, she would just sit here and feel sorry for herself, and then run back down to her room and pack her things before Karolina could notice she was gone. Or something. That didn't seem like the most intelligent course of action, but she couldn't think clearly at the moment.

[totally open, obviously.]

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"Nico had a couple of those," Victor realized, once he ran the description through his memory. "Um -- she's goth. She wore more corsets as outerwear than your average person."

He leaned his head back, thoughtful. "So, if you ever wanna join a subculture, you have the wardrobe down? But they never looked easy to move in."

"They aren't," Olive noted, shaking her head, and now she was totally imagining Nico to be like, a totally hot and intimidating goth chick who could wear corsetty things without any awkward falls or inability to breathe. Awesome. "I spent a month in things that had to be laced or buttoned up and it was...uncomfortable. Also, stilettos never get easier to run around in."

"See, I always thought that but she wouldn't admit it," Victor said lightly, and wondered if Nico had somehow magicked her clothes into not getting in her way. "Though at least with stilettos, you get weapons on your feet if you need to kick somebody."

"So if we get attacked tomorrow night," Olive said thoughtfully, "you just stand back and let me and my shoes handle it, okay?" Pause, and then, "I hope I didn't just jinx us. A...normal homecoming would be kind of extra-amazing right now."

"I will do my very best to make it as normal as it can be," Victor promised -- which struck him as a pretty ironic thing for a robot to say.

He raised an arm and hesitantly tried to put it around her shoulders. "So ... do you want to talk about the video more? Or are you kind of talked out about it?"

Olive was normally not a huge cuddler -- she wouldn't initiate it, anyway -- but at the moment, she didn't really need more incentive to curl a little closer to Victor and tentatively tip her head to rest on his shoulder. "I mean, if you have questions or anything, I can answer them. But...I feel more okay about it than I did, anyway. I'm not going to cry on you or anything."

Not that she had been crying in the first place, obviously. Leaf in her eye.

"I wouldn't rust, if you had to," Victor told her, and brought his fingertips up to tangle in the bottoms of her hair. "Not a question, more a ... comment? You're maybe harder on yourself about what you told your teacher than you have to be."

Olive sighed, shaking her head very slightly -- she liked his fingertips there, and didn't want to jostle them away. "I'm not sure I'm hard enough on myself," she argued quietly. "I shouldn't have told him. It wasn't any of my business, and yeah, it sucked that his wife pinned the chlamydia thing on me, but...no, seriously, I facilitated a divorce. I hate myself a little for it."

"Yeah, but how long were they going to stay married if she was sleeping with other people?" Victor asked, also speaking quietly -- he didn't want to make Olive pull back. "I mean, no, it wasn't exactly your business, but she messed up first and bigger. Don't hate yourself."

"Mmm." She sighed, settling against him a little more. He was comfortable, shut up. "People got hurt 'cause of something I did, and that sucks. Like, as much as I think Marianne needs to start smoking pot or get laid or something to chill her out, I don't even really blame her for going after me. I'm not embarrassed about any of it, really -- like, hi, no real sense of shame over here -- but I wish people hadn't gotten hurt in the wake of it."

"I know," Victor said, still petting her back. "And it does suck. And you're nicer about Marianne than I would be, you know that? I would have just decked her somewhere along the way."

"She actually hit me," Olive noted. "Closest I've ever been to getting in a fight. So...you know. We could still do that. Roadtrip to Ojai to punch her in her definitely-not-God-given nose."

She was just saying.

"Don't tempt me," Victor said, actually sort of serious. "Next time I need to go home, I could totally take you with me and hop a dimension over just to smack her."

"See, I'd want to go home and meet your people anyway," Olive noted, "and punching Marianne is just bonus. Her face would be even more classic than the time I asked her if the higher power I had to answer to was Tom Cruise."

Victor snorted. "Somehow I'm guessing she wouldn't see the humor," he said. "Also, you should meet them. They're going to start bugging me about you if I mention Homecoming, anyhow."

"Bugging you in a good way?" Olive asked. "Rhi's been doing victory laps over being right, by the way, speaking of friends at home."

"In the 'we're happy for you, but who's this person?' way," Victor said. "It'll be a whole new thing, one of us dating a civilian. Oh, and Rhiannon totally knew what was up before we were ready to admit it."

"Is there anything I should be briefed in?" Olive asked, smiling a little. "Or should I pretend to be a....non-civilian?" She didn't know the technical term here."

"Don't tell any of them we have a Karolina here, and don't tell your roommate anything you pick up in L.A.?" Victor offered. "People keep telling me I might mess up the timeline if she knows too much."

He glanced off to the horizon. "I dunno. I mean, our lives are weird, but mostly they're just kids. I'll probably think of a ton more stuff when we're planning for real."

"I won't say anything to her," Olive said. "Kinda gives me a headache, anyway. The timeline thing, I mean."

She paused, fidgeting a tiny bit, and added, "...thank you for being awesome about things, by the way. I mean, I know this whole thing, in light of what you and your friends sound like you deal with, isn't that big a deal. But...still. It's nice to know you're cool with my biggest, scariest formerly-secret thing."

"I think multiple timelines give all of us a headache," Victor ventured. "And it's nice to ... know your biggest, scariest, formerly-secret thing. Even if you didn't mean to tell me this way. But seriously, if you didn't freak out about my stuff, like, almost at all, I owe you this one."

The Roof [Thursday evening]

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