The Roof of the Dorms, Tuesday Afternoon

[genesishero]

It wasn't that Evan was big on shirking his responsibilities, but this week he was seriously not feeling up to going into work. With Thanksgiving in a couple of days, 'service with a smile' or even being in remotely the right mindset to be helpful to customers was the last thing he could manage, and so he'd handwavily left his boss an apologetic message saying that he couldn't come in today, and he'd spent most of his morning in bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking and trying to get the heavy weighted feeling out of his chest.

Of course, being a dog owner, it wasn't like he could hide in bed forever. It was a couple of hours into his 'stay in bed all day' escapade that Ozzy decided that it wasn't just time for walkies, it was time to leap up onto the bed to inform Evan of the fact that it was time for walkies by licking his face into submission until his boy relented and finally rolled out to pull on his clothes. And once Ozzy had been taken for a walk, it just seemed like a terrible waste of the day to crawl back under the covers. A tempting waste of a day, but still a terrible one. So, Evan grabbed a book and an umbrella, and he made his way up to the roof. It was cold and a little wet out, but that wasn't a bad thing, necessarily. It was difficult to mope when you were trying to keep your book dry.

... There were worse ways to cope with a case of holiday blahs than reading outside in the rain in November, right? Yeah. Yeah, there had to be.

[Open roof! This kid, sometimes. Honestly.]

Comments

[solarhippie]

Karolina had a portal to get to in about an hour, for Thanksgiving in Los Angeles. And since she was all packed, she was... pretty much just doing the dance of the 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do now'. Which, even though the weather wasn't great, led her up to the roof, for want of anything better to do.

"... Oh, I didn't think anyone would be up here."

[genesishero]

"That's kind of what brought me up here," Evan admitted, peering out from under his umbrella and offering Karolina a tiny smile. "Sorry, did you need the roof for something? I can be quiet and out of the way..."

Really, he wasn't as tiny as he used to be. He'd apparently had a growth spurt in the past year or so, but 'out of the way' was still completely doable.

[solarhippie]

"Oh, no, no," Karolina said, shaking her head. "I mean, I can go back downstairs too, if you'd rather be alone. I didn't come here for anything special. I'm just killing time."

Maybe they could have a politeness-off.

[genesishero]

They could just be courteous to one another until one gave in and let the other be more courteous!

"Oh... I don't mind the company," Evan ventured, glancing down at his book. "I was just, um, reading."

On the roof in the rain in November, which was perfectly normal, thank you.

[solarhippie]

"... Really?"

It wasn't judgmental, really. The way she glanced around and tilted her head was more like she was wondering whether there were any feasible benefits to reading on a roof in the rain in November that she'd somehow missed.

[arsenicmauls]

Old Lace hated the rain, but unfortunately for her, Gert knew the amount of times that deinonychuses needed to be walked per day, and she happened to care about sticking to that number, so today their walk was bringing them to the roof of the dorms. It was a bit like a compromise, because that way, Old Lace wouldn't have to dirty her claws in muddy grass.

"Come on, just ten minutes," Gert was insisting as she stepped up onto the rooftop with her pet in tow. "Oh. Hey, Evan."

[genesishero]

"Gert?" Evan blinked up from his book, glancing out from under his umbrella. "Gert and Old Lace," he amended. "What brings you two up to the roof in the rain?"

Apparently it was a happenin' place to be.

[arsenicmauls]

"Walkies," Gert said succinctly. Old Lace growled, clearly unhappy with that term. "What about you?"

[genesishero]

"Fresh air," Evan volunteered. "Ozzy and I already finished his walkies, and now he's napping, and I had a book I was reading..."

There wasn't really a way to spin this that made it sound less weird, at least to his own ears, so he tapered off and added a shrug.

"I wanted to go somewhere quiet to read that wasn't my room."

[arsenicmauls]

"And the library and the common rooms were too arid and paperback-friendly?" Gert wondered. Hey, if he was up here to use the Roof of Emo to its full potential, she wasn't judging, but she did want to at least demonstrate that she was all ears if he had something bothering him that he wanted to talk about.

[abitlowkey]

"Are you not cold?" Loki, stop flaunting that you're fine with the chill. It was uncouth.

[genesishero]

"A little bit, I guess," Evan replied, glancing up at Loki and shrugging. "I've been to colder places, though."

He'd been thoroughly trounced once in Antarctica. That had been... not fun at all.

"I guess I haven't really been paying much attention to the temperature, though."

[abitlowkey]

"Perhaps to be blamed on the season," Loki ventured. "The Internet tells me it lends toward melancholy and peppermint Starbucks."

Mostly the latter.

[genesishero]

"Well, there's no Starbucks on the island, so I guess I've got to default a little toward the first," Evan replied, wrinkling his nose a bit. "I'm kind of looking forward to spring to hurry up and get here, honestly."

[abitlowkey]

"Winter has hardly even begun!"

[ultron_junior]

"It's going to get colder," Victor observed, sounding dismayed by this fact. "Hey."

[abitlowkey]

"Hello, Victor!" Loki needed to stop being cheerful about the weather.

[ultron_junior]

"Hey," Victor said again, squinting. "So ... you're in a good mood."

[ultron_junior]

Victor had been thinking about working some more on flight, but when he got up to the roof --

A, it was crowded. B, it was raining harder than he'd thought. So no flying for him, at least not right away.

"Is there a reason everyone's up here?"

[genesishero]

"I was reading," Evan replied, and then started pointing everyone else out, one by one. "Passing time, taking the dinosaur for walkies, and... Um..."

Was 'being Loki' reason enough to be up on the roof? Evan had no idea.

"How about you?"

[ultron_junior]

Victor shrugged a little, rubbing the back of his neck. "So I've been working on flight lately, but in the rain ... I dunno."

[genesishero]

"Well, it'd definitely be cold," Evan noted. "And wet. Have you done much flying before? I'm pretty good at the flying part, but my landings kind of still need work."

Angel was supposed to show him how to do that, but Evan wasn't really rushing back to the Jean Grey School for lessons, either.

[arsenicmauls]

"That's what I was saying," Gert put in. "Weird that people actually volunteer to be out in this weather, huh? The Los Angeleno in me is screaming in terror."

Also, "Hey."

[ultron_junior]

"And we have like six more months of this," Victor said pessimistically, if not entirely accurately. "East coast, man."

He flicked a wave her way. "Hi. Old Lace likes the rain?"

[arsenicmauls]

Gert shook her head. "Hates it. She needed the fresh air, though, so we're toughing it out."

Well, she was. Old Lace was whining about it.

"And don't get me started on how gross it's going to be when it starts snowing," she added. "It looks good in movies, but I'm pretty sure I hate it."