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[greatamazingfeelingsboy]

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.

Comments

[greatamazingfeelingsboy]

"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.

[more_magic]

"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?"

[greatamazingfeelingsboy]

"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.

[more_magic]

"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."