Re: Log, the B&B: Jack & Newt P
Any suggestion his shyness was pathological, Jack would have given short bloody thrift. It had after all, dwindled sharpish when sent to a boys' school where to be shy was labelled namby-pamby and anyone who had that moniker was given sidelong looks and whispers about being a poof or something. And after all, he'd found out early on that you could fake being bombastic and over-confident well enough that most people believed you, it was, Jack believed, exactly what his father would have done. But the truth was there was an awkward sort of space that yawned wide in between his rib-bones whenever it was someone new that mattered or someone that he ought to be very impressive for and that space compressed sharply under pressure, a sliver of silvering panic that was either given room to breathe by backing off, or - as he'd begun on, but would mature in the fullness of time - deliberate obstinateness and blunt rudeness was better than giving the impression he didn't know what to say or how to behave at all.
But Newt wasn't somebody Jack especially wanted to be rude to, and the sharp bloom of something like panic had tendrils wrapped around his rib-cage. But none of it was anything he'd had to manage with his own brother before. He couldn't remember being shy with his younger-now-older brother, which of course, made the whole thing even worse as he loathed feeling something that felt like weakness - or rather, he'd been told his entire boyhood was weakness, and undoing that was like trying to unmelt chocolate.
The peering, on the other hand, that was down to Newt himself. Eye-contact had never, in Jack's recollection, been Newt's best friend. But he looked around Newt's room, for the substance of the greenery and the inevitable presence of animals, and the dry, dry sense of humor pulled at one of the strings that had meshed the odd, raw feeling to his insides. "A lot weird, actually," he corrected, and he thought about opinions.
"I hate my own shoes," he said with a hand stretched out for the cup, "Or I don't like the parts everyone's inevitably set on telling me about. They want me to be somebody I'm not yet, or they want me to want to be it, or something. I had an argument with Dahlia, who was upset and I don't know what it is I'm supposed to do to fix any of it, apart from grow up quick." He said it with the kind of careless verve he was rather proud of pulling off, except that he looked miserable while doing it and cradled his tea-cup.
"I don't think I've changed," he said rather helplessly, shrugging under his coat. "Except I probably do eventually. How's growing up for you? Is it as unpleasant as it sounds?"