Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
Re: Tandy/Billy/Atticus: the lake
Tandy didn't know what he was, precisely. He had emotional intelligence, because he could tell Billy was still surfing particularly deep water right now and he didn't need the smell of something singeing for that to be intelligible. He hadn't been assigned labels, allocated like a peg in the classroom when he had needed his name spelled out above for him, and attempts at psychologists when he had been ten and mute had gone nowhere. He had made a habit of folding emotion away into neat piles, like Marie Kondo-ing the inside of his temporal lobe and it provided a comforting stop-gap, a firewall between the world and its ability to utterly and completely suck, and Tandy himself. It had been that way long enough that assessment of Tandy, affectation or problem or issue was irrelevant. Tandy was how Tandy was, which was how broadly, he thought of himself.
He smiled in Billy's direction, small and non-excessive but he shrugged, less Atlas, too careless. "If I say I don't think obnoxious is the right word, that's probably extremely obnoxious," Tandy said, seriously, before he cracked. He could imagine Atticus older. He appeared to live in his own skin, rather than need extra time to grow into it, or that was the impression taken from extreme comfort and casual reference to being lazy enough to merit notice. "I think lazy is more pejorative than 'relaxed'. Given you're driving the ferry, I would say relaxed, maybe." Which was angled with its own smile.
"Like a video-game level," Tandy said, looking at Billy. "What would you collect points from? Boats and cooking ability?'