newcomb | mingle log | the quad and elsewhere | we were young and drinking (coffee) in the park

Entry tags:

mingle log | the quad and elsewhere | we were young and drinking (coffee) in the park

Characters: Gansey and whoever shows up
What: Interpersonal interaction! Meet each other face-to-face while nothing is on fire
Where: the quad, unless elsewhere seems cool to you
When: loop 1, day 10 (6/10 irl)
Content Warnings: nothing yet. please use and check thread subjects

It's a pleasant day outside. There's a nice breeze and the sun is doing its best. At very least, it's not raining and warmer than it was yesterday. This is, statistically, likely to bring college denizens out of their dorms and offices since rain seems to often be on Newcomb's horizon. Fall in not-at-all-New England is lovely that way.

Gansey, for his part, can be found throughout the day in several places! He likes hanging out near the clocktower to study, since he's found time works best there (at least for him). It's nice to have a watch that's doing something vaguely akin to timekeeping for once.

But he's an explorer at heart, so he can probably also be found in the library, the computer lab, and wandering the grounds. Gansey isn't sure he's interacted with anyone outside a classroom or on Fermii since the train crash, so he's more likely than usual to strike up conversation instead of waiting for it to come to him.

The real question is this: where's everyone else hanging out today?

[ i'll be throwing gansey at anyone who doesn't note that their tag is closed. please mingle! ]

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Gansey knows almost nothing about tarot other than that the women of Fox Way used it frequently and almost never in his presence. He makes mental note of the artist names for later.

"Can you read cards? I can see how they'd inspire you. Have you learned how to show people what you see and feel?" Managing to communicate those things in any medium seems like one of the greater secrets of the universe.

Iggy laughs silently, hand pressed to his mouth. "Me? Gosh, no! I just like the pictures."

He himself as he considers the question fairly. "I think so," he says. "Hard to say for sure, since art is so subjective, you know?"

"Hey, you never know. I've only really got the Fox Way ladies to go by, and it all seems tied together for them." Ghosts, cards, scrying in mirrors and bowls of blood-dark cran-grape juice (wine is for drinking, jesus mary!), the whole nine yards.

"Hmm." Gansey ponders the nature of art and artists. "I think," he says after a moment, "that if you're content with what you've made, there will be people who see the right thing, even if it's not exactly what you see."

Iggy can't get over the Fox Way ladies because it's just so uncomfortably closed to Fox sisters. It makes him think of his great-great-grandma, and he doesn't particularly want to do that.

"I have to hope so," he replies. His smile breaks forth once more. "I think at the end of the day, we all just want to be understood."

The Fox Way women are mostly not sisters, but there are mothers and daughters and undisclosed levels of cousin. They also make the supernatural seem as inevitable and everyday as doing laundry. Nearly everything about Fox Way is the polar opposite of the Fox Sisters, thank goodness.

"I think so, at least in glimpses." There's no power in the world that can keep Gansey's face from mirroring that smile. "Art creates a legacy. With art, you could be known by people whose parents' parents haven't even been born yet."

Iggy laughs silently again, shaking his head. "More like I'll fade into obscurity, but thank you."

He's content to walk in silence a little while. It's strange to have met someone he can be so open with, although he's still expecting to mess it up somehow.

"So... I guess we're gonna be seeing a lot of one another, if we're all stuck on campus. Not complaining. Maybe like... you can check out my room sometime, once I get it set up."

"Well, not everyone is going to be Van Gogh or da Vinci, but we have the internet." Even plenty of things that should have faded into obscurity will live forever.

Walking beside Iggy, Gansey is thinking the exact same thing. Good job, boys.

"That'd be nice. I'm in Carroll room 42, if you ever want to stop by. Not sure anyone else lives in the building." He chose the Hall for the quiet and the furiously blooming climbing roses. "It's still looking a bit bare, but not too bad." There's another pause, Gansey scuffing his docksiders along the ground a few times. "I'm a terrible insomniac, so if you're ever up in the middle of the night you can stop by."

"I'm in Abilene! Number sixty-nine." A grin because he absolutely chose that on purpose.

"Yeah, I need to decorate. I think I'm gonna paint the walls." He has no idea if that's allowed, and cares even less.

Iggy glances over, grin turning coy. "Yeah? I just might."

"Oh, you must've gotten there early to get that room." Gansey picked room 42 as a joke, too fussy to have done anything like claiming room 69 as his own.

"What color?" Gansey doesn't particularly care if it's allowed either. There's no money on campus, they can't be fined. "Oh, I wonder if that will stay. Shame to have to repaint once a month."

Iggy's coy expression makes Gansey's ears go pink. "I need to find myself an insomnia hobby here. In high school it was a scale model of the town we lived in." At uni, someone had made a joke about his surname and knitting, and Gansey promptly undertook the task of learning to make the fishermans' sweaters whose name he shares. Out of everything they've talked about thus far, he's reluctant to mention the knitting. "Company's almost always welcome."

"Right? Or I'm just the least mature person there."

Iggy blinks. "Oh yeeeeeeeeeah. Gosh. Guess we'll find out." The idea of such impermanence is a little bit overwhelming. "But, uhm, I was thinking... greens and blues? Maybe a mural, I dunno."

Oh, the pinkness! So adorable. "You could do that here! Or like... cross-stitch? That's fun and portable." Iggy naturally has zero hangups about 'girly' crafts. "I'll make sure to knock before entering. Just in case."

"Somehow I doubt that." Gansey waves an elegantly dismissive hand. A willingness to be silly is not immaturity.

Only after it comes out of his mouth does it occur to Gansey how really disconcerting the idea is. There's an increasingly large pile of don't think about it in one corner of his mind, and he tosses this into the pile. "Oh, a mural would be nice. May as well make it your own, right?"

He shakes his head, hair falling into his eyes. "Maybe. It takes up more floor space than a dorm has on offer, but recreating the campus from cereal box cardboard would be a serious challenge." What a nerd.

Iggy nods. "Exactly! And if it sucks, I'll paint over it." It wouldn't be the first time Iggy's had a home decor project go awry.

"I mean, I'd be impressed." His tone implies Gansey could do anything and Iggy would find it impressive.

"That's the spirit," he agrees, and then laughs about Iggy's willingness to be impressed, the seeming ease of it.

"It's something to keep my hands busy when my brain won't let me sleep." His tone is a verbal shrug; when Gansey looks at the products of his insomnia he mostly just sees the time he would have preferred to be sleeping. Maybe taking up knitting again would be better. He could at least wear or gift all those hours. "But the model Henrietta was certainly a conversation piece. I wonder what the people who bought Monmouth thought when they found it glued to the floor."

Iggy raises his eyebrows.

"...your house had a name? Oh honey, you were rich!"

"My warehouse had a name." As though buying a warehouse to live in during boarding school isn't nearly as ridiculous. "It was an abandoned manufacturing plant, and buying it outright was cheaper than staying in the dorms." So the kind of rich where buying a property is a viable alternative to paying the equivalent of rent. "It had a lot of windows, almost a whole wall of little square panes of glass. We never did figure out what was manufactured at Monmouth."

Iggy stares, then bursts into perfectly silent laughter.

"Oh, I like you! You're weird!" he exclaims with genuine delight.

Iggy gets it, and Gansey's grin is all summer sunlight.

"That's what I'm told." Like the Camaro, Monmouth represented a part of Gansey that feels the most real to Gansey himself and inexplicable to the average onlooker. "Why don't you laugh out loud?"

Iggy shakes his head, grinning. At the question he blinks; nobody has ever asked him that before.

"Oh. I dunno. Habit, I guess."

Not entirely a lie.

"Fair enough." Close enough to a truth that it doesn't seem worth pressing about. "It looks like it would be a nice laugh, that's all. Tell me about your home?" The place Iggy considers home, he means, not just the place he grew up or the place where he was living last.

Iggy smiles and looks down. He is a man used to compliments, but that's not one he's ever heard.

"My home? Oh, gosh. I don't really know what to tell you. It's the pacific northwest, so it rains a lot. If you don't like being wet it's not the place for you."

Prepare for odd compliments, they're part of life with this guy.

"Despite residing on the other coast, I don't mind the pacific northwest weather. It's good hiking country and I'm washable." There is no universe in which Gansey looks like he enjoys the outdoors for more than maintaining his admittedly excellent tan. But he doesn't have the lily-soft hands or perfect fingernails of someone who objects to dirt, and his stupid boat shoes sure aren't just scuffed by carpet and polished floors.

Iggy snorts. "Glad to know you're not dry-clean only," he says.

He glances over at Gansey. "And you're gonna pry all my stories out of me too quickly at this rate! Then I'll lose my mystique and how am I supposed to keep you coming around then, hm?"

"That half of my wardrobe didn't arrive with me." Thank goodness. Newcomb does not need Gansey in bespoke suits even if he's already managed to find himself a sport coat for just-in-cases.

Gansey laughs. "You have more stories than the ones you've given me." He's starting to think Iggy doesn't know how many stories he actually contains. "And they might be the smallest part of your mystique anyway, sunshine."

"Mine neither." A sigh as he mourns the loss of his truly ridiculous wardrobe.

"Well, sure, but most of them are stupid." He has enough self awareness to recognise that, at least.

"Horseshit." But he's smiling.

"I'm sure we can work on it." Gansey can't imagine Iggy as a suit person, which means he's some kind of other person as far as sartorial choices go.

"If you keep talking yourself down I'll have to find a newspaper to roll up and smack you with." And where's he even going to find a newspaper in this time bubble?

"I'm not a liar." Pleased, Gansey grins back.

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dead_tongue - 2024-06-25 02:27 (UTC) - Expand

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