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! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Iggy looks up with a smile as bright as the sun.

"Yeah? Retro! I love it!"

He turns the volume down (a little) and sits up.

"You want a real cigarette? I've got some. They and this--" as he wiggles the vape, "--made the interdimensional trip with me. I dunno if I can get more here, but I'm easily swayed by handsome men."

That sunny smile is returned, although Gansey's is just this side of practiced. He sits with a loose-limbed grace. "I'm good, thanks. Never took up that particular vice." 'The smell clings and you can't smoke in a library' is what he actually means. Gansey looks like a very clean-cut boy if one puts aside the hair in need of a trim and lazy smattering of facial stubble. "If I see any handsome men in the vicinity I'll point them in your direction." Iggy gets a more genuine grin after that, slightly crooked with comfortable self-depreciation.

"You know, I'm just realizing that showing up at a university via a time-rip and a flaming train really limits the standard introductory small-talk. All the basic 'why are you here' questions are just right out the window. I'm Gansey, though."

Iggy isn't particularly bright but he notices a lot more things than most people assume; a fake smile is something he can spot no problem. But since the second is more genuine, he decides that maybe Gansey isn't a fuckboi.

"You do that," Iggy says happily. "I'm particularly fond of any with great hair."

He presses the back of his hand to his mouth, stifling a laugh.

"Well when you put it like that it sounds weird. I'm Iggy. As in Pop."

Upside, Gansey is honestly not a fuckboi, he just looks like he should be. Nothing about him is smarmy, it's definitely more a 'people expect this of me and I meet expectations' deal.

"Given the masterwork on your head, I'd imagine you're a hair connoisseur." Iggy's hair is delightful in how it mirrors his personality, and Gansey appreciates that sort of thing. It vaguely reminds him of someone, and not because he's got a lesser version going on himself. His hair is currently caught in the no-man's-land between 'needs a haircut' and 'this is absolutely on purpose', but Gansey has been blessed with a mop that manages to look excellent even while it's a mess.

"That's because it's weird. And what a good name, Iggy-as-in-Pop. It fits you." This appears to please him as well. He's not used to interacting with anyone as bubbly as Iggy, but his expression and the tension in his shoulders betray that he's getting more comfortable with it. "So, what were you doing before you ended up here?"

Iggy fluffs his curls. "Okay, you're becoming my new favourite person, sweetie," he says. His voice is low and pleasant.

His smile somehow widens. "Thank you! It's short for Ignatius, isn't that tragic?" He hauls himself to his feet then, rising... and rising. Iggy is six-foot-one, which somehow just makes him seem even more ridiculous.

"Rolling at some sort of club," he says. "I woke up on the train convinced I'd just taken something a little too strong. It wouldn't be the first time."

He sucks on his vape but being just so considerate he exhales downwind. He also turns his phone off, apparently having decided conversation is more entertaining than music.

"You?"

"Slightly tragic," Gansey laughs, bright and genuine, his head tipping slightly back as he does. "But given that my full name ends in 'the third', I have zero stones to throw regarding what parents decide to call their children." He knows what nickname he'll end up with if he reveals his given name is Richard.

When Iggy says he ended up on the train thinking he'd blacked out, Gansey frowns slightly. "Isn't that risky? Being that intoxicated in public, I mean." Or maybe you're a bit of a control freak, Gansey.

"I was hiking, I think. My climbing gear was with me on the train, but my memory is still a bit fuzzy. Lots of things are, but trying to fill in the blanks just gives me a headache. I was attending university anyway, so this is a very involuntary transfer."

Oh, that's a lovely laugh. Iggy is visibly charmed.

"The third? So your family is either rich, or totally redneck. Those are the only people I know who get to be thirds."

Iggy flaps a hand, unconcerned. "Oh, for sure! But I'm never going to win any awards for making good life choices."

Iggy pockets his vape and studies Gansey with interest. "Oh yeah? What's your major? I was finishing my last year of art school."

Because of course he was.

"Wealthy as charged. My recovery from chronic rich-white-boy-itis is going well, according to the one who diagnosed me." So he's used to being around the kind of people who will call him out if he's being an obliviously privileged ass.

"Are your life choices working out for you?" He shrugs. "If you're happy, they can't be that bad. Awards are overrated." On the subject of 'awards for life choices'...

"I'm double majoring in business management and history, the former mostly to keep my parents off my back. I took a gap year, they were...displeased." His grimace gets waved off with a lazy hand motion like swatting at a gnat. Gansey being a business major and why is equally as obvious as Iggy being an art student. "Of course you're an art student. What type of art?"

Iggy snorts softly. "That's cute," he says. "But I'm not gonna hold your socioeconomic status against you, sweetie." Considering that Iggy loved getting presents from rich guys, he figured he couldn't really talk.

He beams again. "Do I look unhappy? Honestly, so far so good! Although this is my first time in an alternate dimension or whatever. So we'll see how this goes!"

Iggy's eyebrows lift and his lips curl into a little smirk. Business. Of course. Although he believes that rich parents would force their kids into taking that shit.

"History, though. That's way more interesting than business. Do you have a focus? Like I dunno, medieval Europe or something?"

Iggy preens a little. "Thanks! I do watercolours, mostly. A lot of landscapes. Not gonna lie, the art building here is pretty fantastic. I'm kinda stoked to work in it."

There's something about that statement--I'm not gonna hold your socioeconomic status against you--that shakes Gansey much more deeply than such an innocuous thing should. Maybe Iggy didn't mean it to be deep, but some vague tower of emotions trembles in his mind nonetheless.

And then: Do I look unhappy? Oh, that deflection resonates like a gong. Gansey's entire expression shifts just slightly but becomes infinitely more vulnerable for it, and his eyes are so very, very old. When he smiles it's a mixture of humor and the empathy of a master of not looking unhappy. Iggy is the first person Gansey has ever encountered that makes him wish he had an affectation for using pet names on strangers, because someone needs to call this boy darling in a way that doesn't mean too much. Gansey, for better or worse, has a fixation with names meaning things that sits adjacent to the fae of old tales.

"It's not me who decides whether you're happy or not, Iggy. And I'm practically a stranger, you don't have to justify anything at all to me. If you're happy, you are. If you aren't, try something different." His smile widens, absent of teasing or pity. It somehow looks almost like an invitation. "Alternate dimension in a bubble where time is even more relative than usual probably wasn't where anybody was expecting to end up."

When Iggy asks about his focus in history, everything about Gansey brightens. "I spent almost eight years studying Welsh history of the late middle ages in specific and the British Isles more generally, along with the phenomena of ley lines. My university studies have been on ancient cultures in Europe and Asia--there's a general absence of lectures on ancient North American cultures at my fancy-name school." It's vastly easier to get accurate information about the colonizers than the colonized. "I just like very old things."

"Once you've built up a portfolio I'd love to see. I'm one of those people who loves art and has zero talent for it. My skills can be summarized in years of piano lessons, notebook margin doodles and the occasional instagram-able photo." Gansey isn't an envious person by nature, but there's a little bit of envy there regarding the ability to create beautiful things.

The change in Gansey's demeanor is subtle, but Iggy has been trained his whole life to pay attention to people's emotional weather.

His sunny smile only falters for half a second. "Nobody is happy all of the time," he says truthfully enough. "But I'm generally content with my life, yeah. Or I was. I liked school. I liked my job. I liked where I lived. I'm a little nervous about being here because it's unknown. But the people seem nice and the weather is great."

He really does love the fall.

Iggy nods when Gansey explains his history focus, and he grins again at the mention of 'ley lines.' He was never good at academics, but weird stuff? That he has a passing familiarity with.

"Hey, Instagram might pay better than real art if you can get brand deals," he points out.

"But sure! I'd love to show you my stuff. It's pretty dull, but I'll show you anyway."

So has Gansey--his family has honed the microexpression into an art and he appreciates the amount of strength and craft there is behind a truly convincing smile. He's not sure exactly what he sees, but he sees something. "No, nobody's happy all the time. I think that would be awful, in a way. Joy is an extreme emotion just like anger. Contentment is more achievable." He leans back, supporting the tilt on his hands as he looks up at the sky. "Autumn in this climate is particularly lovely."

He catches that grin at ley lines. "You know about them? Ley lines? They're incredible. The town I lived in during high school was in the middle of a triangle of crossings. A sleepy hotbed of strangenesses." He loved it there in Henrietta.

"Oh lord, no, no branding." He chuckles, pulling out his phone from home. It doesn't get a signal here, but charges just fine in his backpack. This is a guy whose phone photo album is jam-packed, and he scrolls through until he finds what he wanted.

The picture might as well be designed for insta, one of those taken out the passenger side of a car where the side-view mirror down in the corner shows a bit of the back of the phone, his arm out the car window and the way the wind musses his hair. The focus is the landscape; tall grasses dotted with wildflowers blur along the rough shoulder of the road and then stretch out beyond until they meet forest crawling up the gentle valley hills. It's a summer day with a piercing blue sky accessorized with fluffs of cloud. The road curls in foreshortened oddness like a faded black ribbon. The whole thing should be generic, but something makes it more than that. I love this place like life itself, it whispers.

"That's Henrietta." His smile is nostalgic. "Landscapes aren't dull at all."

"I'm not really sure where we are," Iggy admits. "But I love the trees! So many colours." He gasps suddenly and loudly.

"Ohmygod. Do you think they have pumpkin spice lattes here?!"

But he refocuses. "Oh, yeah, like I know what they are. I don't understand them? But my dad had books on that sort of stuff." His folks had a very eccentric library.

"Are you into that stuff, then? Like, uhm, was your hometown basically the Bermuda triangle?"

Iggy moves closer so he can look at Gansey's phone better. His gaze is sharp, interested.

"It's so pretty," he breathes.

"Where is this? It looks like something out of a road trip movie."

"Neither am I, but it reminds me of New England. Or original England, I guess." And then Iggy brings up the PSL. "Oh, I really hope so. They're harder to make yourself than egg nog lattes."

Gansey laughs, shaking his head. "No, Henrietta is mostly the opposite of the Bermuda triangle. There's plenty of strangeness, but it's subtle stuff and good vibes for psychics, according to the ones I'm acquainted with." He shrugs; that stuff is beyond him. "Ley lines are kind of like magical rivers of energy that run in straight lines. They're all over the globe, and that energy pools in places where lines cross each other. Even when they don't know it, humans tend to build things like churches and government buildings on ley lines. Some people who live on the lines end up with strange abilities. It's interesting stuff."

When Iggy scoots closer, Gansey leans so that he can easily see the screen, the phone hanging between them. "Isn't it? That's a few miles from Cabeswater, which is a forest on one of the ley line crossroads outside Henrietta. Everywhere that wasn't getting groceries or pizza was kind of a road trip. It's a one main street sort of small town, but they have a Starbucks." The hallmark of a place being real by outside standards, or something like that. "What's it like where you call home?"

"New England... I've never been. Or to Old England. But I trust you!!" Geography was never his strong suit.

Iggy looks excited again. "Good vibes only, but like, for real! I love it." He nods and nods again. "Right! Yeah, I heard about the churches thing from my dad. And he said in the UK you can follow like, those really old rocks? Like trace from site to site in straight lines." He thinks that's how it works, anyway.

"Cabeswater," he repeats carefully. "Henrietta. Gosh. They sound so... sultry." He's picturing iced tea and summer nights and sexy all-american guys.

Iggy beams. "Wet. Cold. Foggy." He gestures with one elegant hand. "It's all mountains and ocean. Rocks and evergreens. Rain and rain and some more rain, but you can see find seals in the harbour with big black eyes and orcas out further past the boat lanes."

"I've been to both, and you're basically living it right now. New England loves its old-for-America buildings that look beautiful and do a mediocre job of keeping the heat and cold out. We're lucky it's October, there's a ton of snow in the winter. A lot of England isn't that different, just replace snow with rain. Clouds adore England."

Sultry. The word makes Gansey's smile turn into something that belongs on a hot summer night surrounded by fireflies. "That's definitely one word for it. Henrietta's one of those places where summer sits in the valley like a sauna."

When Iggy starts talking about his home, Gansey's eyes light up in a completely different way. He's rapt, fascinated by the imagery. "It sounds beautiful too. Just in a harsher way. You're a lot of sunshine for growing up in a rainy place."

Iggy gasps again. "Is it October?! That's my birthday month!"

Because it's all about him, don't you know.

Oh. That's a very lovely smile indeed. Iggy, who adores people quickly and often, smiles right back.

"You've got such a way with words. You ever write?"

He flaps a hand at the compliment. "Oh, you! You're a sweet talker. I can tell. Heartbreaker, I bet."

"Well happy birthday month then." It can be all about Iggy. Gansey likes it when things are about other people.

"Only in my journal and also whatever professors demand." That is a definite yes in the way where he never shows anything of personal importance to anyone literate. Gansey's brain is full of sprawling imagery that he hordes like a dragon over gold. "I've been told my prose is florid." He imparts this as though it's a character flaw. There's practically a wink.

"Am not! That would imply I'm not being honest." He laughs. "Definitely not a heartbreaker. There would need to be hearts to break to earn that title, and the only serious relationship I've been in ended with an amicable parting of ways. We even still talk." What a precious little demisexual he is.

"Thank you!" He primps his curls. "I was born on Halloween. I'm a Scorpio." Like this is some great achievement.

Iggy covers his mouth and giggles silently. "Florid," he repeats. "I dunno what that means. It sounds dirty."

His eyes widen. "Really? A looker like you? I'm shook."

Iggy leans in and lowers his voice as if there's anyone who might overhear. "I've never had a romantic relationship," he confides.

"So you have a birthday with bonus candy and a possibility of ghosts, nice." He remembers that one of his friends was a ghost, so it can't be that strange. (He remembers what happens to ghosts that hold on when they should pass over, but he pushes that thought aside in favor of a sunny day in the company of a nice living boy.)

"Dirty is exactly how my English teachers have felt about my tendency to over-describe things." Iggy has the right idea about florid prose.

"You haven't?" Gansey'd be tempted to call bullshit if Iggy wasn't adorably sincere. "I've spent like half an hour with you and that's enough to know you're adorable and sweet." He can't imagine a certain type of boy not tripping over their feet about Iggy.

Iggy's smile stays on, but his eyes flinch. He's used to ghosts on his birthday alright.

"Something like that," he says, but moves on fast. "Don't all old famous authors over describe things, though? Like uhm, that dead English guy... Dickens? I feel like he probably was very descriptive." He's not sure since he didn't do very well in English class.

Iggy beams and flaps a hand again. "You," he says. "Such a charmer. But uhm, nope, never! I'm actually horribly socially awkward. I've just captivated you with my natural wiles so you haven't noticed yet."

Oh dear. Gansey puts one and one together and gets to somewhere around 'do not joke about ghosts to the guy born when the veil was thin'. He gives a little wince of a smile in apology.

"Dickens was paid by the word and we're still suffering for it in classes everywhere." This is imparted like an amusing anecdote. "I think Hemingway fanboys just decided adjectives are a sin."

Iggy is adorable and it almost hurts a little, honestly. "You haven't been yet." And Gansey won't tell him if he is. It's nice to just talk with someone. "So the wiles win out over the awkward is what I'm hearing."

"Well then there you go! Length equals classic literature! Your teacher was just jealous - I bet he was a frustrated author."

Iggy looks interested. "Which one was Hemmingway? The one with cats?" Yeah. He might have slept through English class.

Iggy looks coy. It's a well rehearsed expression. "The good looks help with the distraction. But, yeah, I was homeschooled so I'm actually really stupid with people."

"I wouldn't be surprised if my teacher was a frustrated author. Good point." He grins. "Hemingway was the guy with the cats and booze and cigars, yeah." Gansey seems used to summarizing things for someone who slept through class. Just because he's a nerd doesn't mean other people are.

"At least half my friends would say I'm also stupid with people, so we can burn that bridge when we come to it." The smile he shoots at Iggy is far softer than the words. Stop talking yourself down, sunshine, you're delightful.

"Right! ...I have no idea what he wrote! I'm more of a Chuck Tingle kinda guy." Iggy's tastes are definitely lowbrow.

"Yeah?" Iggy smiles right back, optimistic and positively devoid of artifice. "That's hard to believe. You seem so nice! Are you secretly a serial killer or something?" Like a serial killer would just tell him.

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