fandomhighdorms | The Roof; Sunday Afternoon [06/17].

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The Roof; Sunday Afternoon [06/17].

To hear her mother tell of it, Astrid never had a father. Deifying herself, Ingrid likened her daughter to Athena, sprung forth from her forehead like she was none other than Zeus. Astrid, of course, knew that wasn't even remotely true, nor did she expect that her mother thought she'd ever believe it. If anything, there was her birth certificate, naming the male part of her chromosomes as Klaus Anders, born in Copenhagen, Demark, residing in Venice Beach, California.

And then there was a photograph, though that was something of a secret Astrid wasn't supposed to have discovered. Tucked away in one of her mother's books of poetry, Windward Avenue, a Polaroid of them at a beachside cafe, with a bunch of other people who'd looked like they'd all come off in the beach - tanned, long-haired people wearing beads, the table covered with beer bottles. Klaus had his arm over the back of Ingrid's chair, careless and proprietary. They looked, to her, like they were sitting in a special patch of sunlight, an aura of beauty around them. They could have been brother and sister. A leonine blond with sensual lips, he smiled all the way and his eyes turned up at the corners. Neither of Astrid nor her mother smiled like that.

The picture and the birth certificate were all she had of him, that and the question mark in her genetic code, all that she didn't know about herself. Mostly, she just wondered what he would think of her. If they'd ever crossed paths. If one day, they'd meet. If one day, when she was a famous artist, he'd see her work and be struck in ways he could never quite understand. Or if he'd instinctively know that was the mark of his own flesh and blood.

Usually, Ingrid wouldn't allow dwelling on such sentimental things. But without her there, being both motherless and fatherless this year, all Astrid could do was dwell, up on the roof again as she'd felt it had the best track record for moping so far, running her thumb over the picture, over Klaus's face, as if trying to remember it, so she'd know and maybe he'd know if they ever truly did pass each other by.

[[ like I can refuse a good chance for a dramatic mopey post! slightly cribbed from chapter seven of Janet Fitch's White Oleander; open roof is open!]]

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Sabine hadn't felt like being cooped up anywhere today, so she'd come up to see what the view was like in case she felt like sketching any of it. And immediately once she got there she wondered if she was interrupting something.

"Hey there."

"Oh," Astrid turned her head, lowering the photograph instinctively, smiling faintly to see that it was Sabine, even if part of the reason she'd come up here was so that her cool roommate wouldn't have to witness her sulking and moping, "hey. Needed some fresh air?"

...their room did smell an awful lot like paint more often than not, after all.

Was it bad that Sabine hadn't even considered fresh air, considering how much of her time was spent around chemicals?

"No, I figured I'd see if there was anything worth drawing," she said, holding up the sketchbook. "Did you come up for air?"

Astrid shrugged. "It's not a bad view," she said, which didn't really answer Sabine's question. "I like it down by the beach better, but..." She shrugged. "It's nice here, too."

"Haven't done that yet," she admitted, going to sit over on the ledge. "I probably spend too much time indoors."

Just wait until she lived on a spaceship.

"It's a really pretty island," Astrid said; she felt she was being a little generous, but if she thought about it, it was actually true. "All the different shops are really interesting, too. I still miss home a lot, but...it's not the worst place to be. If you're going to be stuck somewhere, it's not half bad."

A statement rife with irony that this Astrid might never truly know the truth of.

"And homesickness gets easier," Sabine assured her. "We haven't been here long enough to really adjust all the way."

It wasn't really homesickness, though, was it? For Astrid, it was more accurately called loneliness, though homesickness worked, too.

I am your home.

Another classic from the poetic lips of Ingrid Magnussen.

"That's true," said Astrid, nodding slightly. "But I still feel...settled. I don't wake up every morning wondering if that's the day I'll get a call to be sent back. And I've adjusted much easier than I thought I would."

And yet not nearly as well as she suspected she was.

"Glad to hear it," she said, and shrugged. "And in a month you'll probably feel it more. Settling tends to sneak up on you."

"It's weird," she said, "thinking we've even been here as long as we have. What about you, though? You still trying to find a way to get out of here?"

It certainly didn't feel like Sabine was planning on going anywhere else anymore, at least not to the point that she was the first few weeks.

Sabine shrugged. "I'm still keeping a lookout, but there's nothing I really need to get back to right away. I could use a change for a while, honestly."

The alternative was going back to bounty hunting on her own and constantly hearing or seeing terrible things about a tyrannical government so yeah, not in a rush.

Astrid nodded a little, mostly to have some sort of response, because she was being reminded very strongly that she really was not used to talking to people much.

"Well," she finally managed, "I'm glad. I'm sure any other roommate I'd get wouldn't be nearly as cool. How's the work on the fish going, anyway?"

"Well," she said, "it doesn't actually glow in the dark."

An emphasis like that was definitely earning Sabine a side-eye.

"But it may as well?" Astrid guessed. "Am I going to need sunglasses to look at this thing?"

She had to think about it. "Probably not, but since these things have been outside anyway it might not hurt."

"I really can't wait to see the finished product," Astrid said, "in all its awful glory."

"It gives the fish personality."

Like all the previous stuff hadn't.

Tip didn't come up to the roof too often -- getting pushed off it by a well meaning rock had that effect sometimes -- but it felt like a good day to moodily stare out over the town.

"Hey Astrid. How's it going?"

Well. The streak of having the roof all to herself was officially broken, but, hey, at least it was being broken by people Astrid liked and not moody jerks who thought they owned the place like the time she tried the beach.

She tucked the Poloroid back into the pages of her mother's book and offered a faint smile, wrapping her arms around her knees. "Hey, Tip. Not bad, I guess. Just wanted to come up and enjoy the view, I guess."

If it helped, that moody jerk was now a slightly less moody middle aged dude.

Tip could tell that "just wanting to enjoy the view" wasn't the primary reason why Astrid was up here, but she wasn't going point that out. Instead she found herself a spot to sit -- not too close to the edge, and looked out over the town.

"It's pretty spectacular, huh. From this angle you'd never guess it was full of weirdos."

Astrid figured Tip was going for the basic, generic sort of response, up until that last part, which made her snort.

"Yeah, right," she said, scanning the view once again, "almost."

Going to school in a castle off the East Coast was pretty bizarre right from the get-go, really, but they both knew that that barely even scratched the surface.

When gaze returned to Tip, she tilted her head a little. "I never got a chance to thank you yet for your book recommendations," she said. "I really liked them. They were good."

[[oh, sure, right when I get pings, that's when we get busy all of a sudden...]]

Tip wasn't big on "generic".

"Yeah? Glad you liked them. Let me know if you want any more, I kind of read all the time."

And the more people she could get reading books by black ladies, the better.

"Same here," said Astrid, though her tone was a bit wry, rolling her eyes slightly, "though it's not entirely by choice."

Tip had seen The List. Tip could understand where she was coming from, she assumed.

"But maybe I'll stop by again next week, once I've killed off a few more from the list."

Tip laughed at that. "I'll look forward to it, then. Pick out some really good ones for you. I'm kind of impressed, you know. I was never any good at reading the stuff I was supposed to."

She was quite happy to be at a school that didn't come with required reading lists.

"I don't mind," Astrid admitted, a faint laugh of her own, shaking her head. "I'm used to it. Grew up with it, pretty much. Sylvia Plath bedtimes stories, Percy Shelley nursery rhymes."

"That sounds . . . really terrible," Tip said with another laugh. "Oh my god. I mean, I grew up basically raising my own mother, but at least I didn't get raised on depressing literature."

"Raising your own mother?" Mothers were, of course, dangerous territory to tread, but Astrid couldn't help be a little curious. "What do you mean?"

So help her, if Tip said something about her mother having hatched from an egg or magically being turned into a five year old for the majority of Tip's formative years...

...and Ingrid said she had no imagination. This place was going to cure her of that in no time.

It was okay, Ingrid. Those things were only true in a metaphorical sense.

"My mom was really young when she had me," Tip explained. "Like, not a whole lot older than we are really young, and she kind of didn't bother to grow up until I was, like, eleven. It was just the two of us at home, so instead of letting our lives implode all the time, I stepped up and did the budgeting and scheduling doctors' appointments and things." She quirked a little smile. "I even taught myself to drive. I was very precocious."

"That...pretty amazing, Tip," Astrid said, after a long moment of sorting through all the familiar things in that...and all the things that weren't. She couldn't imagine doing half those things, though their lives always did seem to be on the brink of imploding. But, no, Ingrid wouldn't let that happen; whenever things got close, she'd just pick them up and move them elsewhere for a while, always to return, once things blew over.

Except this last time. It was already too late by the time she started smelling the smoke.

She shook her head, a little bit awe-struck, and a little bit something else.
Of course, she realized, Tip could be making it all up, like a pathological liar. She was willing to suspend her disbelief at least a little, though she kept a healthy reminder in the forefront of her mind that everyone here was nuts.

"I can't imagine having a kid at our age."

"Right? How much would that suck?" Tip shook her head. "That's part of why I'm here, actually. Not -- I was never pregnant or anything. But once Mom started being, you know, a mom, I wasn't really willing to let her. So we figured boarding school wasn't a bad plan."

The conversation had been a lot longer than that. It had taken two years of battles and occasionally screaming at each other before they worked it all out. But Astrid didn't need to know all the details.

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The Roof; Sunday Afternoon [06/17].

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