greatamazingfeelingsboy

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daniel arlington

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Sunday mornings are a good, quiet time to go for a run. He's even got a halfway decent route mapped out. He jogs from Candlewood, straight down Mulholland, and once he hits the park entrance, he grabs a path and runs. He alternates his speed as he goes, and occasionally even dodges into the trees to get some different terrain under his feet.

He's slowed again to a jog when he feels familiar emotions, and he slows, then follows them to their source. Daniel Arlington is jogging ahead of him, and Caleb picks up his speed to catch up.

"Oh, hey," he says. He's smiling, because even as he draws closer he can feel that something's different. Daniel isn't upset or disappointed. He's happy. He's delighted, under the focus that usually comes with running for exercise's sake.

It's a far cry from how he'd looked when he'd approached Daniel that day in the museum. Caleb is wearing jogging sweats and a hoodie, face pink from the chill, but his eyes are lit up, grin growing the longer he's standing next to him.

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"Few people's would be at this hour," he says, unable to suppress a brief grin at the too-quick denial and the flustered explanation that follows it. "Not without a substantial jolt of caffeine."

Seeing a bench a few feet away, Darlington bobs his chin in that direction, jogging to a stop alongside it. "Probably why there's so many cafes this close to the park, come to think." He huffs a laugh, setting a foot onto the bench and stretching.

"It's good, though," he says, doing some stretching of his own. "I mean, I don't really do coffee. I prefer tea? It's better, for, y'know."

He gestures his hand near his head, indicating his empathy without saying it. There are a couple of people, early morning joggers like them, who are near enough to hear if they were paying attention. He doesn't want to give them a reason to.

"You, um," he starts, then course corrects. "Things seem to be going okay?"

"Really?" he says, his tone one of polite interest, masking the more honest spike of curiosity beneath that Darlington's aware Caleb's likely to pick up. He lets out a short, considering hum, glancing over at the other nearby joggers before he continues, more quietly than before. "There's a logic to it. Caffeine's a stimulant even for the most mundane of us, so I can only imagine." If he was home, if he had access to the library at Il Bastone and the stored knowledge of all the Lethe delegates who'd come before, he might have continued in this vein for a while, positing theories and bombarding Caleb with questions, but he makes himself halt if only for the moment--and with no small amount of effort.

With the way Darlington smiles at Caleb's question, the other young man wouldn't need any preternatural ability at all to figure out the answer. There's happiness and relief there, a shade of arousal (that he does his best to suppress for Caleb's sake), a few lingering traces of the regret at his own stupidity that had kept him and Alex apart, all before he even says a word.

"I have a sense I know what you mean by things," he says, stretching out his other leg before he glances back over at Caleb. "To which the answer is yes. Better than okay, if that doesn't sound too absurd."

Curiosity usually feels like Pop Rocks bursting against his arms. Daniel's curiosity feels bigger, sharper. It almost hurts, and it's surprising enough that Caleb reaches up to rub one arm without thinking about it. But then Daniel is moving on, has decided 'not right now,' and it fades again, back to Pop Rocks.

Instead, he starts thinking about Alex. Caleb recognizes the butterflies, the lingering regret that's wrapped up in relief and joy and hot honey. The colors aren't muddied together. They're perfectly marbled and glowing sunrise warm, and Caleb's having a hard time containing his grin by the time Daniel speaks.

"I mean, 'okay' felt like an understatement before I even said it, so," he offers, still grinning. "I fucking told you, Dude," he adds, because it's true, and because the smugness feels good.

"So you did," he says. "In your own inimitable style."

He can hear the smugness in Caleb's voice, and knows it's more than deserved. Had he been so prescient at seventeen? Not about things like this, he thinks, if anything at all. His focus had been elsewhere, spread between day-to-day survival and the quest for more; that escape he'd been seeking, the promise of something glorious waiting somewhere just beyond his perception. He'd found it eventually--and even now, he chooses to believe the cost had been worth it. It had to have been.

"I'd like to think it was the apology that did the trick," Darlington continues, his smile showing no sign of fading quite yet, "but Alex hasn't let the blanket out of her sight since I gave it to her."

Caleb smiles again, but he shrugs. "Hey, um, I'm sorry for... how I came at you. I could've done that better, probably." He reaches up to rub the back of his neck. "I'm not always great with, like... controlling my anger?" He shrugs again. "Guess it's kinda obvious."

He sits on the bench, adjusting his laces for no reason other than to give his hands something to do.

"I can't deny that I deserved it," Darlington points out mildly, watching the sheepish roll of Caleb's shoulder and the way he fumbles with his laces. "Though I'm thankful neither of us needed to explain why someone on a field trip decked a museum staff member without any evident provocation."

He breathes out a soft laugh. "I meant what I said that day," he says. "I'm glad Alex has a friend like you."

"I wouldn't have hit you," Caleb says, and he really wants to believe that's true. It's likely he might have, if Daniel had gotten mad, too. Depending on how strong it was, he might not have had the chance to fight it back. He likes to think he would have, but he really doesn't know.

There's still so much he's learning about his ability.

"Listen, I'm glad it worked out," he says. "Seriously. She really likes you, and... You're a good guy."

There's sincerity in that, all of it, and Darlington smiles. Just as he had at the end of their meeting in the museum courtyard, he has the sense the two of them have turned some kind of corner here. An odd one, maybe, given the first impression each of them got of the other, but Darlington's never shied away from something new and strange. "I'm lucky it worked out," he says. "I wasn't at my best, as well you know, and...Alex knows what she likes. And who, despite everything."

He straightens up slightly, rolling his shoulders. "Don't mean to keep you from your run," he says, even though it had been Caleb who'd initiated the pause they'd both found themselves in. "Had you just started, or were you on your way back?"

"I'm about halfway through," Caleb answers. He pushes himself up off the bench. "I can get outta your hair, if you want?"

He doesn't mind running alone, but he wouldn't mind the company, either. Daniel feels good, and it's nice to sort of soak in that. He's been soaking in such negative emotions, lately, and he doesn't regret any of it, but it's still taxing, in its own right. He could use some positive input.

"No, please join me." Though he so often enjoys the solitude of his morning runs--or, back home, of those hours in the converted ballroom at Black Elm, training and drilling through one thing or another--the prospect of getting to know Caleb a little better is not one he's about to turn down. "The company would be nice."

He feels the vibration of his phone in the pocket of his sweats, and he pulls it out, seeing a message from Alex on the screen; another request for him to come back to the Bramford...and another suggestion of what might await him when he does. Ran into Caleb, he types back, a faint smile on his face and a light flush along his cheeks even as he tries to project a sense of unruffled calm. Mind what you say.

Coughing lightly, he puts his phone away again. "Where were you headed? I tend to turn around just before the boardwalk, but if you had another route in mind...?"

Caleb lets out a small, telling laugh. "Uh, are you sure you don't want to just... head back?" he offers, giving him an out when he feels heat telling his dick to pay attention. He tries to push it away, like Michael's been telling him.

"I usually just circuit the park a few times," he adds. "Really, if you want to go back, I won't be offended."

"Christ, you really do pick things up, don't you?" he says, low enough that only Caleb will be able to hear, even as vaguely nonspecific as the statement had been. Darlington passes a hand over his face, breathing out a sigh.

"I don't need to head back, I promise," he says. "Come on, let's go."

Caleb hesitates for only a moment before pushing to his feet. "Okay, but if Alex gets pissed at me, I'm totally throwing you under the bus."

He grins, bouncing on his toes a little like he's trying to get his blood pumping again. He's taller than Daniel, so he adjusts his stride as they go, so they can run side by side. He doesn't want to pull ahead within the first few paces, especially since Daniel had decided to stay and talk.

He knows it's because he has questions. He can feel the Pop Rocks again, bursting against his arms, and he glances over at him.

"Go ahead," he says. "Ask away."

Darlington laughs as they start down the path, heading towards the opposite corner of the park. "Noble of you."

They run in an amiable silence for a while, keeping pace with one another, adjusting speed and stride where necessary. He's almost surprised to find it so easy, after so much solitude--and most of that, self-imposed. Catching the turn of Caleb's head out of the corner of his eye, he looks over, smiling at the faint resignation he thinks he hears in the younger man's voice. "I truly don't have to," he says, a polite and entirely superficial demurral even as he's already sorting through questions in his head.

"Inborn, or acquired?" he asks after a moment, his voice still low even though they're on the move, with no other joggers close enough to overhear.

Daniel lies, right before the curiosity swells and he asks his first question, and Caleb laughs a little.

"I guess I was born with it," he says, "but it didn't really show up until last year? And then I just thought I was ADD, or something."

He nods; it's the answer he'd assumed, at least in part. An ability like Caleb's didn't seem like the kind of thing that could be learned, not the same way Darlington had practiced and perfected the creation of wards or the mixing of the Bullet over the last three years. He shouldn't envy him, any more than he envies Alex her own ability, but once again it feels like an ease and access he'll never have to a world he's so desperate to know.

"But you figured it out, eventually," he says. "Or were told?"

"Told, yeah," he answers.

He tells Daniel about the fight he'd gotten into, the mood swings that his parents had been really worried about. He tells him about meeting Dr. Bright, and how she'd asked so many questions about the situation, until she felt confident in her 'diagnosis,' if that's what it could be called.

"She started helping me figure out what the feelings were, and how to recognize them," he continues. "And now I can tell when something isn't mine. Like anger." Which is what caused that first fight to begin with. "I can't always, like, do anything about it, but, it kinda seems like the more I feel, the easier it is to feel? Like working out a muscle."

Or talking while jogging.

"Something like practice," Darlington says. "Learning the bounds of what your empathic abilities are capable of." The Arlington way of manners, might, and know-how held little if any space for what his grandfather might have called psychological claptrap, but practice is something Darlington understands implicitly. "Sounds as though your Dr. Bright came along just when you needed her."

The path narrows a few feet up ahead, and Darlington lets Caleb pull forward, following single-file in his wake until it's wide enough to run at his side again. He uses the time to think, to consider his next question. "Would you have chosen it?" he asks, and it's blunt and direct, but honestly meant. "If you'd had a choice in it at all."

Caleb puffs out a breath between his lips. He's quiet for awhile as he really, really thinks about it. Then he glances over at him.

"Man, I don't know," he admits. "Like, I can think of more useful things? And at first, probably I would've said 'fuck no,' but. Now, I can't even really imagine not having it, y'know?"

He doesn't mean for that to sound like a cop-out answer, but it's the truth. He's grown so used to feeling people's feelings, he thinks maybe he'd feel empty, or numb, without them pushing into his body. Daniel's emotions are a warm press into his ribs, slotting a bit unevenly next to his own, but it's sort of like holding a cat. It's a comforting presence, until it starts to claw and push and demand to be released, but then you miss it when it's gone.

"Sometimes, it's really overwhelming," he continues, "but I know a lot more about people than I used to. Than I ever really thought I would, y'know?"

"I can see that," he says once Caleb's finished, after a thoughtful pause of his own. "It's not the same, because it's all been acquired on my part rather than innate like you or Alex, but everything I've learned to do, the wards and the incantations and everything else...it's nothing I'd give up."

There's so much Lethe provided him, things wonderful and terrible in near-equal measure, and while the mysteries of Darrow have yet to reveal themselves--and he knows they're there, they have to be--at times Darlington's not sure how they'll compare to the secrets he'd already come to love.

"How do you manage it?" he asks, the two of them turning at a fork in the path and heading further into the center of the park. "Aside from practice, and everything that doctor of yours taught you, that is."

Caleb's quiet again before finally shrugging. "I dunno," he admits. "Dr. Bright taught me how to balance my ability, but it doesn't always, work. If someone's feelings are overwhelming, or if there are a lot of people feeling the same thing at once, it kind of carves me out."

It sounds violent when he says it like that, and while it can be, it isn't always. Sometimes it's a slow swell, like filling a water balloon to its capacity and then beyond. But he hasn't burst yet. Not that way, anyway.

"Sometimes, I just have to remove myself, like, from the situation," he continues. "If I want to go to a party, I have to make time to be alone. Tea helps. I drink a lot of herbal tea."

It's all sensible and largely unsurprising, and for a moment Darlington's not sure what else he'd have expected. Some uncanny abilities have terribly mundane solutions, after all--and he knew well enough there were far worse ways of coping.

"Right," he says, the word leaving in a bit of a huff as they keep running. "You'd mentioned the tea, before."

"Most people, my range is pretty short? Like, I dunno, twenty, thirty feet? But the closer I am with them, the farther that goes." He explains that with his boyfriend, Adam, he could feel him halfway across the school. His family, he can feel throughout the entire house. "So, once I leave that range, the outside input fades, and I can kinda decompress, or whatever."

"Explains why you faltered a bit once you were close enough to my table that day at the museum," he says dryly, glancing over at Caleb. "Honestly, it makes sense. You're tied to people in one way or another, you'll be more attuned to how they feel."

Darlington knows that trying not to think about things is the only sure way of bringing them to mind; ignoring them, choosing not to turn down the dark hall in which they live, will only bring them out into the light. He doesn't intend to think about the glacial distance between the lonely boy he had once been and his self-interested parents who'd barely been worthy of the term, nor the way his grandfather had molded and shaped him in a way that Darlington knew he had to think of as love--for to question it as anything else is something he's still unable to do. But he does think of it, wondering if only for a moment whether an ability like Caleb's might have been more of a curse to him than a boon.

As with so much of the uncanny, he wants to know the answer--and as with some of the things he's learned, he's not sure the reveal of it would please him if he did.