Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: Billy/Tandy: the neighborhood
Tandy didn't get anxious. It wasn't a thing. There was a balance of cortisol and adrenaline, of seratonin and dopamine and he didn't get high and he didn't get low, he was steady, every chemical receptor adequately bathed in the respective chemical required. He understood the concept and he understood the science, and if he'd known Billy was churning, he wouldn't have done anything any differently. That was the point of anxiety, it didn't make a difference what actually happened, it was prediction and assumption swirling together into a vortex of improbable awful.
"All the time," Tandy said without blinking. "Gandhi. Matisse. Bowie." Billy's smile was warm. It wasn't molten warm, but steady. It was reassuring, which was kind of weird given that Tandy wasn't in significant need of reassurance but he echoed it, reflected it like that smile held up to a mirror. "You could be scientific," he postulated, comfortably from his position curled on the bottom of Billy's bed. "With effort. And attention to detail."
He cataloged all the ways Billy evaded eye-contact in the next second. It was, from one perspective, super interesting because Billy's face had been all the way open and now Sabrina was studying the bedcover as if it held the forgotten secrets of the Jurassic era, it just needed excavating with a fingernail. Tandy was unruffled. It wasn't a thing, that moment. He made room for it like he made room for most things.
"Hope so? What exactly do you hope, that it'll be a thing in the future?" Clarification, entirely reasonable.