Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: The Woods: Pesha/Tandy
Nobody had like, fretted over Tandy in a decade. Even then, it was probably the school nurse and her idea of fretting was two Tylenol and if you threw up, you sat in the back room that smelled like watery glue until you could leave. And yeah, he was Middle America: NYC washed out like the dirt from the subway eventually. Tandy was all small town, even if he liked the city way better. It was his thing, existing in a small town up your ass for everything even if he wasn't into it.
"Did you become a snob? The shirt and tie cut off the oxygen supply a little?" Tandy was comfortable with the crack, mostly because he could still remember the private school uniform when he had gone, hand in hand with a nanny when he had been young enough to be stuck in shorts and knee socks every morning. Those days were long gone, apart from the aforementioned habits, but he could mock. It came from a place of knowing. "I don't think that kind of growing and learning experience is exclusive to public school, fyi."
He was kind of hazy on his classical references. Tandy had been into math, a little chemistry, computer science had been so slow he had mostly written programs and stuff like, between the teacher explaining the assignment and other people doing the assignment, but he wasn't into English, history, anything that involved a lot of dead people writing about experiences he couldn't relate to. But Sabrina didn't share, he got bossy, and Tandy could have stood all the way and put the whole hand thing out of reach, but he didn't.
Okay, cool. Working hypothesis, the heat was a byproduct of whatever pseudo-chemical reaction was involved in the actual legit use of magic, Bowen. He didn't understand the language, maybe it was some weird, magic-only thing, but he felt the throbbing dissipate.
"Thanks, Sabrina. Do I owe you?" It was the kind of question that fell bluntly into the space between them. If a magic ID was $20, Tandy didn't know how much a magical head-crack cure went for. Tandy liked his debts clear, black and white. "Because I'm stacking up the credits right now and I can't do anything. Just you know, jump universes."