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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"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.

Caleb glances over at him. "Wait, why d'you feel like that?" he asks. "It's like, bitterness and nostalgia at the same time." It's kind of gross to feel, actually, but he doesn't say that. It's like syrup, runny and cold and sticking on the nooks and crannies that used to be clean.

There was no hiding it, not from Caleb, but when he picks out the things Darlington had been trying so hard not to feel, naming them so accurately, he lets out a short and almost startled laugh. "Suppose you wouldn't believe me if I said it was for no reason at all."

He lets them run on in silence for a few more strides, until they're around another bend in the trail, before he speaks again. "I didn't have much in the way of family, growing up," he says. "Even less, after the age of fifteen. For a moment I wondered whether having a...talent like yours might've made things better. Or worse." The honesty of it surprises him, but somehow he feels almost better for having said it.

Caleb tries to imagine a younger Daniel Arlington, but all he can see is one of those small, nerdy kids who looks like he's trying to be a grandpa. Someone people like Bryce and Justin and Tyler would've picked on, back home. He slows to a stop, touching Daniel's arm.

"You can just tell me you don't want to talk about it," he says. "Just because I can feel it doesn't mean I'm, like, entitled to know."

Caleb slows, and Darlington follows suit, looking down at the hand that's placed on his arm once they've stopped. For all of Caleb's size and build, the touch is almost unexpectedly careful; even gentle. "I appreciate that," he says, and means it. "Not sure there's really much else to say about it, as it is."

"But, I mean in general, like, ever," he says. "I don't want you to feel like... like, just because I know you're feeling something, doesn't mean you have to tell me why." He shrugs. "Unless you want to, I mean."

"I've never been very good at discussing my feelings," he admits, and again it feels more like a confession than he'd anticipated. "Not exactly the Arlington way."

What Caleb says is kindly meant, though, and he knows it. "I do appreciate that, Caleb," he says. "If ever there's something I could use a listening ear on, you'll be one of the first people I call." Darlington smiles, genuine and grateful. "I already know you give sound advice."

Caleb rolls his eyes a little, but he's smiling. "I dunno about that. I just... want to take care of my friends, that's all." He's quiet for a moment, then grins. "Anyone ever tell you you talk like an old British dude?"

That gets him laughing, loud and unguarded. "Never in those exact words," he admits. "It's usually something more like old-fashioned. Comes with being thought of as the gentleman of Lethe, I guess."

Darlington grins, rolling his eyes. "Along with too many books and too few friends my own age growing up, maybe."

Caleb is grinning wider, but he says, "I knew it," when Daniel admits to essentially being a nerdy grandpa as a child. "You're totally a nerd, I knew it."

"Hardly the worst thing I've been called," he says. "And there's an accuracy to it. Though before you get the urge to stuff me in the nearest locker, I will have you know I'm a nerd who knows how to box. And fence. And do jujitsu."

Darlington laughs, rolling one shoulder in a shrug. "As I said, too few friends, too much time."

That has Caleb rolling his eyes. "Just because I'm a jock doesn't mean I'm an asshole," he points out. He gestures for them to keep going, and starts jogging again. He's not angry, but there is a little annoyance in his tone.

"No, that's true," he says as they start to run again. He hears that note of annoyance in Caleb's voice, and has the decency to feel ashamed at his ill-considered joke. "My apologies."

"No— hey, no, it's, it's okay," he says. "Don't, don't do that, it's my own fucking damage. I'm sorry."

"You know, if Alex was here, she'd tell us both to stop apologizing before we sprained something," he says, and as though on cue, he feels the faint vibration of his phone in the pocket of his sweats. In deference to Caleb, he doesn't take it out--and tries not to think about the possible tenor of the message.

Maybe he should turn back before too much longer.

"Were you a runner back home?" he asks after a minute, trying to readjust their conversation. "Or just something you picked up thanks to Darrow?"

"Not really," he answers. "I mean, not like this? I play football, so I need to be able to run, obviously, so I'd do a little back home. But here, it's like. It's nice?"

He shrugs. At first, it had been an escape from the Home, so he could clear his head before school, or at night with the hope that people would be sleeping when he got back.

It never worked, of course.

"It is nice," he agrees. "I had a couple standard six-mile routes back home, it was..."

He trails off, already expecting Caleb to pick up on another, brighter twinge of nostalgia as he thinks of the way he'd run all over New Haven, how he'd mapped the city he loved with every footfall: from East Rock to the train station or the now-vanished Coliseum; the trails and bridges of Edgerton Park and the crisscrossing paths of the New Haven Green. His adoration of the place was deep and devoted even now, separated as he is from everything he'd once known as familiar.

"Yeah, it's a good way to spend the time."

Caleb's quiet while he sorts through the feelings Daniel's giving off. Feeling someone's nostalgia is always a little weird for him. It's like getting an insight into a part of them he has no right to, and even though Daniel knows about his empaty, it doesn't make it feel less like an intrusion. It's different from sadness, different from happiness, but somehow both. It's not something people carry on their faces.

It's only belatedly that he realizes he hasn't answered him, so after a moment he clears his throat.

"Jesus, six miles. That's pretty impressive."

Though he keeps his focus mostly on the path before them, the prolonged silence has him glancing over at Caleb before too long. Darlington's always preferred being the one to watch others, to take them in as they are or present themselves to be, and somehow knowing about Caleb's ability makes doing so now just slightly more fascinating. Even in those brief glances, he can see the way he's almost working through whatever he's picked up, the shifting expression on his face as he weighs and quantifies.

Darlington doesn't say anything, just lets him process in whatever way he requires, and when Caleb speaks again, he nods. "It's a habit now, but you're not wrong."