Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: Tandy/Billy/Atticus: the lake
Tandy ate cleanly but quickly. Large, neat bites of food that tasted like Julia Child and Anthony Bourdain had had a love-child proficient with a stove; Tandy had liked cooking, he had just never had much in the way of ingredients but there was a specific charm to concocting precise chemical reactions that resulted in enough flavor that the insides of his nose tickled because his saliva glands were working overtime. He said nothing, while Billy talked about what Atticus meant to him. Meant to him, because as Tandy knew, it wasn't the what so much as the how that came through candidly. He looked at Billy, whose smile had unhitched from tension and who had given up on thinking about whatever it was he had been thinking about.
Tandy fetched the slice. He licked his finger and his thumb clean and then used his other hand, the actual clean hand to fix a plate, because Billy looked as though any disturbance to the equilibrium of plates would undo the universe, that or he'd lose the cigarette butt he had secreted on his person. "Is it, though? I trust Billy to walk the untrodden path," he said, blunted by deadpan, and he handed the man a plate piled high. He liked the cut of Atticus's jib.
"All Hallows Eve," Tandy said. It wasn't a correction, it was thoughtful. Yes, Tandy liked the technical. "How old would you be if you weren't twenty-seven?" He looked at Atticus steadfast. Tandy expected the man to tell the truth, he thought it improbable he wouldn't. "He provided assistance when I gatecrashed the world," Tandy said matter-of-factly as he resumed his own seat. It stood to reason that a man who had lost potentially two decades would understand world-swapping.