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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There's nothing incorrect about what Caleb says, but even so Darlington bristles just the faintest bit; his loyalty to Lethe, even here, still as strong as ever. "Sometimes you don't want to refuse," he says, his eyes still on the path in front of them. "Even if you're aware you can't. Sometimes it's the thing you've been looking for your whole life."

"Whoa, hey," Caleb says, hands raising innocently. "Look, I didn't mean you, I just. It's objectively kinda creepy, okay?"

"No, I know you didn't," he says, wincing a little at his defensive reaction. This deep in his own thoughts, he'd essentially forgotten what Caleb could do, the things he could glean even without meaning to.

Darlington sighs, shaking his head. "Even as much as I owe them, you're not wrong."

Caleb watches him surreptitiously, making sure not to take his eyes of the path for too long, so he doesn't trip over anything. He takes in the protective feelings Daniel projects like brambles, the apologetic ones that brush against Caleb's arms like a gentle fog. There's a lot of conflicting emotions coming from him, but he's sincere when he agrees that Caleb isn't wrong.

"That doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel the way you feel," he reasons. "You kinda had a good experience, right? So, of course you're not gonna want to see the, like, less charitable sides of it. That's, like... my friend Michael. He's been super awesome to me, right, and he's letting me rent his old apartment, and he got me a job, and shit. But if I found out that he'd been really terrible to someone, I'd feel at least as conflicted as you do."

They're close enough in age, and Darlington knows it, but all the same he marvels once more at how...prescient Caleb is, in a way he doesn't think he had been in his final year of high school. He'd had other concerns, to be sure; other things pulling his attention and consuming his time, but his maturity had taken a far different form.

"I told you before how Lethe had failed Alex," he says after a moment. "And not just this last year, not just as my Dante. Before then too, which is only something I came to think about, at least in that particular form, in getting to know her." He thinks about their argument after the Aurelian ritual, before the wine and the smashed crockery, the sudden realization he'd had that she'd been chased to this very point by forces beyond her control. "They'd been aware of her, of what she could do, almost her entire life. Monitoring her, or at least...keeping tabs. They could have helped her. But they didn't."

It reminds Caleb so much of the AM, what he knows of it, at least, that his stomach twists sickly. He's removed enough from it, now, that it doesn't immediately send him into a panic. But he still feels a cold sweat on the back of his neck, and he breathes out a slow, shaky breath.

"Because they wanted her in that position," he reasons. "To hear the offer she couldn't refuse. That's fucking dark, Dude."

"Something like that," he says, thinking of so many pieces that he hadn't quite put together yet: Scroll & Key's waning power; the fact that this year had been a funding year, and doubly important because of it; the few entries he'd made in the Albemarle Book as he chased a theory he still wasn't sure was a valid one. Things were in flux, in a way that even Darlington hadn't understood with all his knowledge and all his devotion, and then came Alex--a girl with more power than, perhaps, even she knew.

He hears the shudder in Caleb's breath, an edge to it that's more than just exertion, and he glances over. "Hey," he says, nodding towards a cutaway in the path a few paces ahead, in case he wants to pull aside. "Are you...? You don't need to tell me, if you don't want to, but we can stop a moment."

"I-I'm okay," Caleb assures quickly. "Let's just keep going." He stares at the path ahead, steadfastly not acknowledging Daniels traffic cone concern. "We— Can we change the subject?" he asks when his heart rate doesn't slow from the near-panic he feels. He really, really doesn't want to have a meltdown in the middle of a running trail.

He'd spooked him somehow, without even meaning to, and while there's regret that now mingles with the concern he's still feeling, Darlington tries to exude a little more calm than anything else. It may not work, may not lead Caleb back to a more even place, but it's what he can do for the moment. "Yeah," he says, and they pass the cutaway without pausing. "We'll keep going."

It takes a minute or two to think of a question that's anodyne enough, something that has little chance of reinvoking whatever had triggered Caleb's panic in the first place. "What else do you like to do?" he asks. "Other than football or running, that is."

That's better. That's easier. Caleb takes another breath before falling back into the rhythm of his running. "Um, you ever heard of Harry Potter?" he asks. "My sister and I played Quidditch a lot, back home."

He almost laughs. Of course he's heard of Harry Potter, obsessed as he's always been with those kinds of stories, even after coming to understand magic as something a little deeper and darker than a schoolboy fantasy. Even so, he remembers being young, devouring each book beneath the covers of his narrow bed at Black Elm--in his tower room, so like something at Hogwarts anyway--and the impulse to laugh is replaced with something softer and just as genuine.

"I've definitely heard of Harry Potter," he says. "Never actually played Quidditch, though."

"It's really fun," Caleb assures. "We usually just play one on one, so it's not, like, official, or anything. But sometimes we get one of the neighbor kids over and he'll be the Snitch."

"You get a kid to..." he starts, trailing off--with a laugh, this time--and a considering nod of his head. "You know, that makes an odd amount of sense, all things considered."

Caleb manages a grin, but it's not as wide as it could've been. He's still just a little shaken. He shrugs a little, though. "Yeah, I mean. I think it'd be cool to play with, like, a full team? Which, I mean, the guys talked me into joining the Drembleydrop team, which... pretty much feels like a weird, Muggle Quidditch anyway."

Caleb continues the trend of light, mostly inconsequential conversation, and given how rattled he'd been--and how suddenly--Darlington can't quite find fault in it. "You're the second person to mention Drembleydrop in so many weeks," he says. "Someone I work with has a son on...god, I can't even remember which school's team. Apparently it's Darrow's favorite sport."

"That's what I've heard, too," he assures. "It's... kinda weird, because from what I can tell, it didn't actually exist until a couple years ago? But people insist its been played for... centuries, or whatever." But he more or less understands the game, so he doesn't care about the details. As long as he can play, he will.

"That's the strangest part of this place to me," he says, grinning at the thought that this is probably only going to cement Caleb's opinion of him as a nerd a little further. "The idea of a longstanding history despite any solid evidence to the fact. I met someone on New Year's who said the whole city was effectively deserted about eight years ago, but good luck trying to get anyone from Darrow to admit that."

He's tried, pestering colleagues and classmates alike with delicately-crafted questions, but all he's ever gotten for his pains--at best--is a blank look just on the edge of hostile. It's infuriating, and only makes him more determined.

"It's so weird," he agrees enthusiastically. "Like, the guys on the team don't even believe that I have a boyfriend back home, right, because my phone didn't come with me, so I don't have any pictures of him. And he's not texting or visiting, because he can't, because he's in a different fucking dimension. And I'm not texting or visiting, either, because, duh. But when I try to explain that, they just look at me like I'm fucking nuts."

Clint's the only one who believes him, and sometimes Caleb thinks it isn't entirely genuine — though it never feels like a lie.

"And yet other things come through just fine," he says, spurred on by Caleb's more steady enthusiasm. "I saw an advisor at Barton a week or so after I arrived, just to start getting some information on classes, and she pulled up my full academic record from Yale in a matter of minutes. Had me fill out a transfer application right there in her office." He laughs. "I was hardly going to protest, but it was still...strange barely covers it, and I know from strange."

Darlington shakes his head, quietly keeping his focus on the path ahead of them for a time. "Were you and your boyfriend together long, before you arrived here?"

"Um... kind of," he says. "I guess, technically, almost a year? But, we sorta broke up, over the summer, and... and now I'm here, so..."

He wants to point out that Daniel's really good at asking hard questions, but talking about Adam shouldn't be hard. It should be easy, and nice, and warm. But Caleb misses him, and has been sort of with Clint, and that makes this a little more complicated than he'd like.

"So it's complicated." At Caleb's age, Darlington had been more focused on the day-to-day of his survival, of keeping Black Elm running and preserving as much as he could the illusion that nothing at all had changed despite his grandfather's death and his parents' subsequent desertion, to pursue much of a relationship with anyone at all. It had been its own kind of complicated, and in truth, he's not sure which he might have preferred.

"I hope it works out, somehow."

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