Re: Billy/Tandy: the neighborhood
“Bowie?” Billy’s gaze brightened with interest, and he cocked his head just slightly where he leaned as he surveyed Tandy’s expression. This was new information, and he considered any nugget of insight he could gather about his new roommate as worthy of being filed away in the Tandy section of his mental Rolodex. The guy was not exactly what Billy would label effusive. He wondered, absently, what the digital equivalent of a Rolodex was since he had a feeling he was way too young to be using that reference. “Can I see sometime?”
He didn’t feel the need to punctuate the request with a reassurance that Tandy didn’t have to show Billy his drawings if he didn’t want. Billy would bet big, Vegas-style money that he did not have that Tandy wasn’t a person easily swayed by social pressures. “‘Could’ and ‘want to’ have a very wide line between them,” he countered with a wink. And ftr, it was not a loaded wink. This wink was entirely benign.
Dragged up from the dawdle of his uncertainty, Billy’s face was still open under the scope of Tandy's question - just visibly conflicted, as that oily wraith of tension spun itself into a knotted loop. It wasn’t the conversation, exactly. It was the reason behind the conversation, the reason Billy’s pulse spiked when he thought about genuine openness, intimacy, that made his skin crawl and his bones itch from the inside. He had to tread carefully, not look directly at the shadow cast by a tall building in the Capital that was now a burned out shell.
“It’s not that developed,” he said slowly, meaning the hope. He couldn’t articulate it too clearly, because that would require a close examination. He wasn’t hoping for something concrete in the future, some tangible possibility of something that he vehemently did not want now. “Just - I want to be okay. One day. Right now I’m not, in a lot of ways. But it’s not like I think I’m the first person to have baggage. So I guess I hope that one day I’ll feel different.”