Re: [jude & hannah: tea]
When he'd been small, formative boy, the apartment in New York had been small and scrupulously clean and starved of visitors. It had been very full of warmth and love and laughter and seriousness, when it came to it, but it had been all from two people and they the only two in the world. People had been passing concern, a balcony's worth of entertainment and Jude had liked people with a longing that came from knowing them in books and movies and in stories rather than persons he his own self had met. Which was to say, when he had been thrown wholesale into a house all small, lonely boys rather like himself, he had forged fast a liking for people that had stood him as he rollicked topsy-turvey into other people's lives and stole things from them.
He thought about Louis now, Louis who had angles and irregularities Jude thought were fascinating, in their own way, and the fact that no matter how you flirted with Louis, he was unbending, as strong as oak for all of that, and his thinking rounded onto Daniel as was near-inevitable, given proximity, eccentricity and history, even if the rumination was out of place.
"He's handsome, I'm afraid. But interesting, he's Scottish, which adds at least half a life's worth of interesting to the mix." She twisted her teacup in her fingers, as if she could read the runes in it. Dusty drifts of tea leaf remnants and he rather thought Hannah would make the story about the runes more interesting than the life it probably talked about.
"You need to climb the trees, or find somewhere so high up you can see nothing but sky. A treehouse, it won't be a beach but you could climb up high enough you could have the sky all to yourself," Jude offered, with his cheek in his palm.
"Bite your tongue, Torah's different," it wasn't that he held onto religion tight-as-tight, but it was a root that drew him back to the city and the balcony and the twinkling lights that were other people's lives, lived as far away practically as being under the sea. "The books are different order. You don't have to believe, I think. The story is the same whether it's believed or it's heard as if it were a story and nothing but. I don't remember, I wasn't old enough to be a man in the faith when my mother died, and my adoptive family weren't religious at all."
Her delight kindled easily, lit match struck against dry tinder, and did life lack drama enough that it was needed? Oh, but Jude recalled most people's dearest friend was not a vampire old enough to see through Revolutions, and who took blood with tea and his own humanity odd occurance in a town full of weird and witchery.
"You mean the kind where they fall in love, regardless of their beginnings? Arguments and tempests in tea-cups and seeing the good in people in-spite of themselves?" Jude grinned, like a boy who'd read a couple and poked through for happy endings. "I'd like that, I think, rather than the other kind, so if we're playacting, please, I'd rather the playact from that particular script rather than the frosty, everyone's miserable sort." She was laughing as she looked at him, even if her mouth was still and Jude didn't mind one scrap. He laughed back, silent as graves.
"Oh, but I'd rather be Rochester. I could be grim. I could have a mad woman in the attic, and you wouldn't know it." He considered Darcy and rejected him, "If the qualifier is curls, find somebody else," he pulled on the ends ruefully. "Who would you be, if you could?"