fandomhigh | Fandom High Welcome Picnic, Front Lawn of the School, All Day: Part II

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!event: welcome picnic

Fandom High Welcome Picnic, Front Lawn of the School, All Day: Part II

Throughout the lawn, tables and chairs had been set up and scattered, some out in the bright, sunny center of everything, and some in the darker, more remote areas.

Eat up, folks! Don't let that food go to waste!

[OCD up! This is the picnic post for general mingling. Roommates, fake siblings and teachers are all here. Since it's outside, the picnic is open to all students, teachers, and townies!]

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"It does kinda complicate that," Sparkle noted, looking at him. "Good test would be to ask him if he knows how to work an electric light switch, or, like, a TV. Oh! Ask him if he can program a VCR or something. That puts a pretty definite date on it!"

A beat.

"Soren's a weird name, though."

Pot, meet Kettle.

"And Sparkle isn't?" Celia said, arching a brow. "He has computers, though. And seemed to think I was silly for asking, so that puts him...well, a fair bit more recent than me. Close enough to this time, I think, but from a parallel dimension."

She shook her head, taking a bite of her cake. "And how have you been, anyway?"

"I've... you know. Been." Drunk, mostly. "Worst part about going here is watching people up and leave, you know? People come to school and then they graduate and move on and there's nothing you can do about it, they're just gone."

He maybe had a few issues. Most of his closest friends had up and left the island, one way or another.

"But not forever," Celia offered, gentling some. "Aren't the alumni here fairly active? And there's...telephones, and such."

She was more of a letter-writer, but still.

"Some go forever," Sparkle sighed. "Some leave the island and never look back, because this place went out of its way to screw 'em up. Some of them leave because they have to, and they don't have time to leave a forwarding address or anything. Not everyone stays in touch, you know? And it's a big multiverse."

And sometimes one of your best friends got arrested by Jedi. And your ex-it's-complicated had to go back to Shadowhunt or whatever. And so on.

Celia stayed quiet for a long moment, then finally offered, "I'm a firm believer that if you're meant to see someone again, you will. Either you'll track them down, or they'll come back. There's no use brooding on what you can't help, is there?"

"Who's brooding? I'm sulking. There's totally a difference."

He was brooding.

"Anyway, meant to see someone again or not, don't you ever just... I don't know... miss people? I mean, I'm not known for my track record when it comes to keeping touch, but it leaves, like, this big fucking crater. Like there's a part of you that goes along with them, that leaves you wondering why you bothered to get attached in the first place."

Celia looked down at her plate, quiet for a moment. "I don't have anyone to miss," she said softly, looking over. "So...no, I've never experienced that. I'm sure I'm due for a dose of it, but I'm lucky enough that no one's left on me, yet. I'm sorry. It sounds terrible."

It really did. The complicated hatred and clinical admiration she felt for her father had made their separation much, much easier, and she missed her mother in fits. The idea of being separated from one of her friends here, though, permanently? That made the crater he had described sound tangible and imminent.

"I try not to do it," Sparkle noted, reaching for a pebble and chucking it across the lawn as far as he could. "Get attached, I mean. You lose enough people and it just becomes, I don't know, stupid to get close to more. Like first it's one thing and then another, family then friends then whatever the hell is left. This place just makes it worse. Makes it feel safe to give a shit. You'd think I would know better."

He reached for another pebble.

"I'm sorry you don't have anyone. Maybe. Maybe that's not so bad a thing. It sucks the first time you feel it. You know that's what it is and it leaves you flat and angry and empty and all full up all at once. Sometimes it's like you can't breathe. Sometimes you just don't want to."

"I'm sure it'll happen," she said softly, watching him. "I've already become more attached to people here than the person who raised me. But I'd take that pain and loneliness and emptiness, if everyone I care about left tomorrow, because at least I got the chance to know them. It could be so much worse. I might leave here feeling empty and terrible and a husk of who I was, but I'll be the better for having known that people could be kind, and I could care about someone and be cared about in return."

Which was a much more personal confession than she'd thought she was going to make, but she somehow thought that Sparkle would understand what she meant, even if he couldn't see past what he was feeling at the moment. She didn't blame him, really. How could she? She'd never felt it.

"Parents are overrated, anyway," Sparkle replied with a shrug. "Mine left us to fend for ourselves, I was bouncing from group home to group home to sidewalk to juvie hall cell to group home since I was six."

No big elaborate tale to spin today. He was still feeling far too empty to playfully lie like that right then.

"Alone is tough. I wouldn't trade in the people I knew, though. I mean, yeah, it hurts. God, I hate that it hurts because it shouldn't. They went and they proved that not everyone is completely horrible and hell, maybe for a bit it even felt like there was something there worth having but I don't care. I don't care."

Funnily enough, that didn't actually become the case, no matter how many times he repeated it.

"I can tell," Celia said dryly, but not unkindly. "It might help if you admit that you do care, though. It wouldn't hurt if you didn't, Sparkle. And it's all right to."

It was encouraged, even.

But Sparkle was very, very bad at dealing with hurt.

At least he hadn't broken into Hannibal's house this time around, though.

"It's okay to care? Yeah?" He raised an eyebrow at her, tilted his head, and flung pebble number two across the lawn. "Except then it's hard to draw the line, like, when you turn on the television and you see horrible shit that goes on all over the world every day, how do you not care about that? When you spend a few weeks as somebody that isn't you, that's happier or sadder or angrier but not alone, never alone, and then you lose that, how can you just turn that off? Or when they take one of your best friends, one of your best friends and they put him in handcuffs and march him away for a trial, and you know he did wrong but so did the people dragging him away, how do you not care too damn much about that?" He laughed a little, ruefully. "I don't care because nobody wants to hear me bitching about this."

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Fandom High Welcome Picnic, Front Lawn of the School, All Day: Part II

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