clara llewellyn set fire to the rain. (claraty) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2012-10-18 08:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, clara llewellyn, mike fitzgerald |
WHO: Michael Fitzgerald and Clara Llewellyn.
WHAT: Mike finally asks Clara out... And she doesn’t get it.
WHEN: Wednesday, 17 October. Late afternoon, after training.
WHERE: Near the Flamingo training warehouse.
WARNINGS: It’s Mike and Clara, so this is slightly awkward and painful. And language. Does anyone really care about that though? I mean, I don’t, but just wondering.
STATUS: Complete.
If there was one thing Mike Fitzgerald was good at, it was getting girls. He’d never had to try very hard, never had to really put effort into seducing a chick; his confidence and charm had always allowed him to land the ones he wanted without much trouble at all. But although Michael was oftentimes cocky about his ability to easily score with girls, it did not mean that he didn’t -- on occasion, very rarely -- get nervous, too. He was still human. It was ironic, really, because Mike had already hooked up with several women at IVI. Whitney, Eden, Lottie, Vi. But none of those had been serious; they’d been mindless hookups on a drunken pub night, or a familiar, if heated, exchange with a longtime friend. This, however, was somewhat different. As he had told Lydie (and Clara), a girl’s fuckability was vastly different from her dateability. And when a girl was dateable, there was a lot more at stake -- because the truth was, Mike was pretty fucking picky. It wasn’t as though he didn’t like relationships; he did. But finding a girl who was worth that sort of effort and time...now, that was another matter entirely. A relationship with the right chick could be awesome; a relationship with the wrong one was always hell. And so, although Mike had been considering it for a while now, there were several factors that had prevented him from asking Clara on a date -- excluding the rather obvious one of having nowhere to really take her in the first place. There was the fact that she was on his team, and simultaneously one of his closest friends. There was the fact that sometimes, she was kind of crazy, and drove him up the fucking wall. But most of all, there was the fact that he was fairly certain his roommate also liked her. But after almost four months into IVI, Mike had decided that pussyfooting around the issue was dumb as fuck. Like he’d told Clara, dating for him was a simple matter: when he dug a girl, he asked her out. Although he’d gotten the okay from Mikael over two days ago, Mike found himself waiting for the ideal opportunity to make his move. That opportunity came Wednesday evening, immediately after training. The rest of their team had already filtered out, but Mike had dillydallied, hoping that he’d be able to catch Clara alone. “Hey,” he said, shifting his backpack to his other shoulder as he walked up to her. Pre-warned that Mike might be asking her out, thanks to Mikael’s odd moment of inquisitiveness from a couple of days ago, Clara had spent the remnants of Monday surreptitiously sneaking glances at her friend, that feeling of tiny butterflies fluttering in her stomach as she waited and wondered, growing more and more anxious as the hours went by. By Tuesday, the butterflies had diminished, replaced by a less pleasant anxiety that perhaps Mikael had been mistaken, or perhaps Mike had changed his mind. Or perhaps she’d imagined the conversation in her head and it was just some strange fantasy she’d concocted in her mind during class one day and was going crazy since she’d now believed, somehow, that it was reality. She spent so much of her downtime stuck in the realm of her own imagination, it wasn’t that far of a stretch, was it? And people at IVI did seem to be crazier than she was used to. By Wednesday, Clara had talked herself out of thinking she was crazy and had instead decided that Mikael may have been right at the time, but Mike had by now definitely changed his mind and dismissed all hope of the notion coming to pass. “Hi!” she returned trying to sound as bright as ever, assuming he was just wanting to catch up as a friend, or whatever. He shot her an easy grin, stepping forward. Training hadn’t been too difficult today -- certainly better than others in the past -- and Mike wasn’t feeling all too tired. He shifted his backpack, which was heavy with his textbooks from earlier, and nodded towards the exit. “Wanna go to dinner?” “Sure!” There was nothing out of the ordinary with this question, Clara decided, feeling a little disappointed. Not that she should feel disappointed, she reminded herself. It wasn’t his fault if he’d changed his mind or that she’d gotten her hopes up for no reason. “Cool.” Mike lapsed into a comfortable silence as they strolled along. He had known Clara for enough time now for such long periods of quiet to not be awkward -- although he was oftentimes talkative, he didn’t feel an incessant need to fill the peace between them with his own chatter. As they turned the corner leading to the quad outside, he slowed his pace. “The weather’s way hot now, isn’t it?” Mike muttered. He glanced up at the sky above, where the sun was beating in full force down upon the campus. You couldn’t even see the forcefield from here, but a part of Mike wished that, along with “protecting” the world from their powers, it could protect them from the Australian heat, too. “This weather’s definitely not as legit as it is at home.” After four months of listening to Mike’s slang, Clara had grown so used to the way that he talked that she never even bothered reacting to it. Legit, she’d learned to assume, was one of those words with multiple uses and even if she didn’t entirely understand how to use it herself, she could pick up the gist of what he was trying to express, at any rate. “I know, it’s too hot,” she agreed, glancing up at stretch of cloudless blue above her with a slight frown. She didn’t know why people complained about Audra’s rain from the other week. She’d give anything to have some right now, just to cool the school down, make it feel a little less like the opposite of home. Australia -- or at least the dead centre of it -- was virtually the complete opposite of everything she’d grown up with. “It’s going to get hotter, apparently. I’m a little worried about that.” “Fuck, really?” Mike said, squinting up at the red-hot sun above. “Not that I’m opposed to hot weather,” he nudged Clara playfully, winking, “because it means chicks wearing skimpier clothing...but there’s got to be a limit, am I right?” Saying so, he gave a cursory glance at what Clara was wearing -- in truth, her outfit was skimpy enough as it was. Not in a slutty or bad way, Mike thought to himself, as his eyes traveled down her legs. Definitely not in a bad way at all. Busy with taking in the beauty of the endless expanse of blue sky above them, Clara was entirely oblivious to Mike’s glances, but rolled her eyes at his statement nonetheless. “Maybe you should go set up camp by the pool, or the lake,” she suggested, adjusting her the strap of her bag over her shoulder as they walked on. “I think everyone will end up being there soon enough. Actually, I thought about joining swim club? But they train so early. I don’t know if I want to get up then!” “You swim?” Mike asked, glancing quickly in the general direction of the lake. This, he supposed, was as good a transition as any to the conversation topic he really wanted to discuss: a picnic at the lake. He had concluded that, out of all the potential places one could take a date at IVI, it was indisputably the best: a lake picnic offered privacy, was romantic enough without being gay, and involved relatively little effort. Thrusting his hands into his jean pockets, he turned back to look at her. “Yo, we should go down there sometime.” “To the pool? Or the lake?” Clara queried, restoring her full attention back to Mike and idly wondering why he seemed so uncharacteristically coy, hands in his pockets and all. “Ooh, like a Flamingo thing? That could be fun!” Was she really that clueless? Or was this, Mike wondered, Clara’s way of turning him down without actually doing so? Maybe he’d been wrong, he thought, matching her wide-eyed stare with a blank one of his own. Maybe she did actually like Mikael, and Astrid’s incessant queries had been the other Flamingo’s way of trying to get distract her competition. “Uh,” he muttered, breaking their eye contact to study the ground. Mike was confident, yes, but he was also terrified of rejection -- he liked to claim that it was ‘fear of the unknown’ but in all honesty, that wasn’t quite the case: the only chick he’d ever really fallen for was also the very same girl who’d ended up breaking his heart. Rejection? Mike knew all about it. Rubbing awkwardly at the back of his neck, he continued, “I mean, I guess it could be a Flamingo thing.” “If everyone will even come,” Clara interposed with a small sigh, her enthusiasm replaced with the beginnings of a concerned frown as she contemplated her teammates and their current emotional states, yet again oblivious to Mike’s uncomfortable awkwardness. “I mean, I don’t know. Do you think they’d feel up to it, even?” “I don’t know,” Mike responded flatly, the enthusiasm from earlier now entirely gone. He kicked at a loose rock, causing it to scuttle forward a few feet. “Maybe.” In truth, the last thing Mike wanted was to spend a day at the lake with the entirety of his team. The girls were more than tolerable, and a lot of the guys were, too, but they weren’t Team Swan. Mike had other people he preferred to spend time with...even if one of those people seemed too stubborn to realize that. Finally noticing the shift in Mike’s tone, Clara’s frown deepened. She cared about her teammates getting along, sure, but this was a much more pressing matter! This was one of her closest friends, after all, her crush on him aside. Shelving the awkward disappointment she felt about his not liking her back, she stopped and reached out to touch his arm. “Mike? Is everything with you okay?” “What?” Mike said, startled by the sudden contact. He glanced down at where her hand lay upon his arm, before looking quickly back up at her. Her expression was one of genuine concern, and Mike found himself confused all over again. Was she playing some sort of weird hard-to-get game? He knew chicks often did, that they thought it made them more desirable or wanted or something, but looking at Clara, he wasn’t sure that was what she was doing. And hadn’t she explicitly said that wasn’t her thing? “Yeah,” he continued, still eyeing her uncertainly. “I’m cool.” “You don’t seem it,” she pointed out gently. “You know you can talk to me!” Mike paused, uncertain how to answer. Sentence after sentence flew through his mind, but each was rejected -- for being too stupid, too lame, or too stupid and lame -- before at last, he simply burst out with, “Is it because you dig Mikael or something?” Her mouth fell open and no words came out. She blinked a couple of times, trapped in this stunned state, unsure whether she’d really just heard him correctly, unsure of how to respond, exactly. “What? No. He’s my friend.” One could practically see the cogs turning in her mind as she reevaluated the conversation from the moment he’d said hello up until now. Why would he ask her if she liked Mikael? What did that have to do with his being okay, or not? Wait. Had he just been trying to ask her out?!? “Then why --” Mike shook his head. “You’re seriously confusing, you know?” “I’m confusing?” Clara started, a little incredulously. “You’re confusing! Why would you even ask me that?” “Because I -- well, you --” he ran his fingers through his hair, his brows furrowed in frustration. “Then what the fuck’s with the whole inviting the Flamingos along when I’m trying to ask you out?” OH, Clara thought, fitting all the pieces together to complete the picture. At first she relaxed, relieved that he was finally asking her out -- and then realised that this was really, actually, most definitely happening. Equal parts of excited and yet a little shy, she softened and smiled. “You were really asking me out??” “I -- well, yeah, fucking obviously,” Mike muttered, lifting his hand to rub the back of his neck. “What’d you think I was doing, putting together a Flamingo shindig so I could fulfill my life dream of seeing Hunter shirtless?” He felt more defensive than anything else; after all, Clara still hadn’t said yes. She giggled a little at his words, only partially at the mental image of Mike advocating for a shirtless Hunter by the lake. More so, Clara was giddily pleased at the scene unfolding before her. He was actually asking her out!! Shaking her head, Clara bit her lip and reached for his hand, slipping her fingers around his. “I wouldn’t put it past you, you know.” Mike laughed. “Actually, he’s only second on my list of top Flamingos to see shirtless.” Wiggling his eyes suggestively, he continued, “Number one’d probably have to go to Muhammed. After all, with the way he gets around...” Trailing off, he looked down at her, his expression slightly more serious. “So that’s a yes, right?” Mike assumed as much, at this point; she was holding his hand. But nevertheless -- well, with the two of them, it was apparently better to simply spell shit out. “Of course it’s a yes,” Clara said with a grin. Her bright blue eyes locked in with Mike’s as they stood somewhere between the training houses and the dormitories, hot Australian afternoon sun beating down on them, possibly not as alone in reality as she would have liked (somewhere in the background, two Vols suddenly went flying in opposite directions, another tossed a rugby ball to a friend, meters ahead there seemed to be a fight breaking out in Spanish) -- but she could rewrite that in her imagination later. Everything was perfect. |