Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: [Tandy & Holly: the good diner]
Tandy hadn't talked to Bea. He hadn't talked to Noah or anyone apart from Sabrina and a little to Travis. That might have been the problem, because in theory, Tandy was totally cool with Holly sweeping into the booth like a stranger with a similar name and maybe some physical similarities but utterly divergent in line with the theory of multiple universes. Which, side-bar, he was not totally comfortable with. But he didn't have comparator points to draw data from to feel anything specific. Mostly he felt tired, the kind of exhausted that had nothing to do with a good eight hours of sleep.
But right, Holly. Who he had never articulated the reason why art was a private thing to, but it was part of the Dead Parents Club thing of not exactly questioning one another's coping mechanisms. And Tandy was pretty sure Holly had his own, sub-surface in the same way Holly had a bunch of stuff sub-surface. Or at least, his Holly did and Tandy wore way more up front than Holly did and even that was just flickers and ebbing worry across his face. Nothing big, nothing super-visible. But emoting.
There was some of that. Ebbed worry, a little relief, a little tension when Holly name-dropped major artists onto the table, and then side-tracked into Twilight Zone. "Right. Well, in the absence of a Marilyn Monroe to color-block, I think I'll stick to the traditional forms of the arts," which was surreally normal, as a conversation. Wasn't it? It wasn't 'hey, this is an alternate universe, and are we tracking parallel in time, or from the same place, or are you a fundamentally different human from a molecular perspective' but that felt a little heavy.
Tandy blinked, and he clocked the waitress asking after the girl, Bea who wasn't associated with like, vivid memories in Tandy's mental picture of high school. "That sounds good. Could I get like, cheese on the fries?" Which sounded objectionable as a concept, but was a classic. Judging by the waitress's face, not a lot of people upped their order to cheesy fries in this version of this diner, which was also surreal because Tandy had done it every time he'd come here. Whatever, it could go in the observational column of data points that kept Tandy very deliberately from the brink of freaking out.
He debated asking Holly about the girl. This wasn't so much as a flicker as sub-surface. Tandy was a big people-watcher. It helped, when you were figuring out the difficulty of anatomy and it was also good for when you needed to figure out who you could reel in with a quick sketch. He was watching Holly now, not deliberately and not obviously, but he was sat back in his seat, and the earpods trailed, and he was twining the hoodie string around his index finger, kind of tight. Really tight, actually, the blood flow was turning the tip of the finger white but Tandy was only half-aware this was a thing.
"I don't understand people who object to adding dairy to their potato products," Tandy said, and he tugged the napkin out of the holder, with all the other cheap paper ones, and began to scribble on the back of it. The doodle was Holly, kinda, but he'd drawn Holly so many times it was second-nature. "I feel like dairy is a key component of the food pyramid. Highly underrated."