Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: [Tandy & Holly: the good diner]
Tandy's stomach felt like a bunch of vultures, all wings and teeth. It was fight-or-flight in action, the adrenal system gearing up to run - because despite being somewhere around six foot three, he was definitely not a fighter which was a proven hypothesis, given the years between fourth and ninth grade when his height had officially kicked in - which was a totally unproductive use of his adrenal system, except. He kind of didn't know this guy and the current working assumption was that he would be different. Altered universe different, which might be molecular, he didn't know. Maybe it was like, under the surface, or maybe he would have different eye-color or hair-color, but it made way more sense that there were a multitude of universes than just two. And the scientific approach didn't really squash the fact that his stomach churned and he felt a weird, weighted sense of expectation. He kind of wanted Holly to be the guy he had grown up with. But it was probably way safer, way less likely to provoke full on meltdown if he just had to cope with a totally different universe instead of pocket elements that were the same.
Which was to say, when Holly approached the table Tandy's chin tipped up and he took the guy in from head to toe. He looked the same. Even the statement-tee-shirt looked the same and Tandy's mouth tugged a fraction at the corner but it was a minor movement and his face re-settled into the kind of ambivalence that was ninety percent normality and ten percent self-control. He tugged the earbuds out of his ears in a pull on plastic wires, and there was a weird kind of resistance going on inside his rib-cage. Because Holly - his universe's Holly - he was cool with seeing his stuff. It was kind of impossible not to be cool with the guy seeing his stuff because Tandy drew when he was chill, and he drew when he was watching TV or a movie and that was kind of life with Holly. But with other people, Tandy was decidedly not okay with seeing his stuff and asking questions about why, or mediums or stuff like that. It was inherently illogical as to why he was uncomfortable, but he was, and he debated whether Holly was a stranger or Holly and his fingers twitched for the notebook.
"So far, I've only aged out of fingerpaint as a medium," Tandy said, his voice comfortably low and he flipped the cover of his notebook and moved it to one side along with the earbuds and phone in favor of his coffee. "I am living a Twilight Zone episode, are you still into that stuff?"