Chapter Text
He closed his eyes, breathing carefully. Quietly, the script unfolded in his head. This one wasn’t complicated.
“Hey. My name is Buddy. I’m an arts student.”
Actually, it was pathetically easy. Practically impossible to mess up. He smiled, confidence returning to his posture as he climbed the lecture hall stairs.
The smooth glass of the twin front doors parted gracefully as he approached. This time, he didn’t flinch. Buddy was slowly getting used to it, the invisible magic rushing through the veins of the twenty-first century, an electric heartbeat powering everything around him. In the past, he hadn’t given much thought to the unsettling creep of industry. He didn’t have the time to spare to wonder what was happening to the world – he just knew something was happening. Anyone would.
He hadn’t really expected to live long enough to see what strange pathways the changing currents of time would force open. Truthfully, there wasn’t much about his life now he could have predicted. Being thrown two centuries into the future was certainly more than he’d bargained for when he climbed through that manor window. Buddy felt it was only fair to be taken aback by it all, at least on occasion.
This was not allowed to be one of those occasions.
Buddy walked calmly into the foyer, not at all terrified the doors would forget he was human and shut on his (worryingly mortal) body. He managed not to glare back at them as they closed. He was trying not to glare at all, today – Chase said it was a good idea to look approachable, and Buddy thought it was a good idea to do whatever Chase asked of him. Within reason.
Three shirt buttons undone was not “overkill for a Tuesday at nine am,” and he would not be convinced otherwise. He was abiding by enough of modern fashion’s dull rules as it was. Goodness, people might think he knew Deacon beyond just rooming with him. He couldn’t have that.
He took the stairs, uncomfortable with the prospect of a tight metal box full of sweaty college freshmen. He pictured the floorplan in his head, ran over the details listed in the neat square slots of his timetable. Third floor, hall two. God knows why they needed two. How many people could fit in this building?
His face betrayed nothing. He probably looked like he was thinking very normal things. First impressions mattered, or so he’d been told. That was one of those rare things Chase and Deacon could agree upon.
Remember your line. I’m Buddy, I’m an arts student. I’m allowed to be here.
Everything was acting, to him, so he might as well learn how real people do it. Even if that meant dealing with… other people. They couldn’t be that different from the ones he’d met. If every possible character could be represented within twelve archetypes, there couldn’t be that many unique personalities out there. This would be easy.
A scarlet door, helpfully ajar. A shuffling column of students pouring through, which he quietly joined. And oh, the noise.
The noise.
So many voices overlapping renders a room an ocean. Buddy allowed the waves to move him, numbly finding his way to a seat low among the tiered crowd. What were we here to watch, again?
He fumbled the bag from his shoulders into his lap, hands resting awkwardly atop the canvas. Chase had asked if he liked the colour. What colour was it, again? A smooth slate grey, almost purple. Yes. He thought it was lovely.
Some monstrous screen like a piece of the sky covered the front wall of the room, his eyes naturally gravitating to the glow. He remembered himself then, realised he must look like a moth bewitched by a streetlight. He should look somewhere else. No professor stood behind the table on the floor beneath the screen, so it wasn’t time yet to listen to the lecture. Beside him, then?
He turned his head, the movement stiff. Someone had already taken the adjacent seat – a girl. Blonde hair. Not half as nice a shade as Chase’s. Something dim about it, artificial.
She was looking at him. Right. His line.
Buddy tried to sit taller, though his legs fought for space under the surface of a peculiar small desk. He cleared his throat. “Hey. I’m allowed to be here.”
That. Was not the part he was supposed to say out loud. They’d laugh him off the stage, and he’d deserve it.
The girl… squinted in concern, but she granted him the dignity of a response anyway.
“That sounds like something you’d say if you weren’t. Interesting move.”
This wasn’t in the script. Buddy’s eyes were starting to lose focus.
“You’re right. I’m an imposter.” Was he even trying to hide it, now? This was a disaster.
But the girl laughed. “For real, man. Aren’t we all.” And she settled back comfortably into her seat, withdrawing a silvery device adorned with bright stickers from a bag on the floor. She set it roughly on the small desk and unfolded the rectangular lid to reveal a dark screen. Buddy hated those things. Completely unnatural, and impossible to operate. He tried not to scowl as her fingers flew across the plastic buttons, calling the screen to life.
Following her example, he scavenged a flimsy spiral notebook from his own bag. Chase had wedged a multi-coloured ballpoint through the spaces in the metal. None of those colours were black, and he’d somehow gotten two clashing neons stuck through the nib at the same time. Chase seemed proud of this ‘achievement’. Buddy fiddled with the pen, startling a little as the pieces retracted into place with a harsh click. He chose to write in blue, carefully pushing down the button until it locked.
The girl had decided to ignore his blunder, or she was too stupid to notice it. A crime with no consequences, then. Buddy’s favourite kind. In the middle of it all, the room had begun to quiet, only secretive mutters still disturbing the tepid air. He looked up from the pen.
The professor had arrived.
Finally, he could just be part of the audience.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
By eleven, he was free of the lecture, with an hour’s break ahead of him. Buddy found himself a quiet place under the spreading shade of a tall tree. He wasn’t there to lurk, or to hide. Those were not socially acceptable things to do. It was only… a strategic retreat.
Having nothing better to do, he reopened the notebook, the first few pages now covered in clumsily scribbled notes. He was trying not to think too hard about why he seemed to be the only student writing anything down. Not that he’d checked.
He couldn’t be that far behind. It was still so early.
Buddy squinted at a particularly illegible section. The letters ran forward at a haphazard slant, tumbling into each other as if they were trying to escape his pen. Writing had been so easy in the body of a villainess. Who knew that counted as a character-specific skill he’d been borrowing?
One phrase managed to reorganise itself into the words he’d meant to write – a quote the professor had solemnly intoned to begin the lecture.
All the world’s a stage.
Or something like that. He might have written it down incorrectly.
He resolved to ask Deacon later about the ‘online materials’ he was supposed to review for homework. Or perhaps just order him to find them for him. That seemed faster.
Buddy flipped to the back of the notebook, eyes scanning over the carefully transcribed timetable covering the last two pages. Deacon had convinced (forced) Buddy to take the campus tour, so he loosely remembered where each sprawling building matched up to its unassuming shape on the little map he’d been given. Thankfully, his classes were confined to the same three or four for the bulk of the semester.
With an hour to kill, though, he was curious about a different building – the cafeteria.
It turned out that was a terrible idea. What joy, that someone had figured out the least useful ratio of open space to student bodies, and then applied it to every building on this campus. Buddy felt like he was suffocating.
He’d taken a moment to stand in the shadow of the door and observe the rules of this place. His eyes tracked the painfully bright dye-jobs and sagging backpacks as they moved in ill-formed lines around tables and laden counters. Start by finding a tray, pick up the food, and then tap the plastic card he’d been given on the terminal at the end. Or hand money to one of the staff. Deacon had half-explained this – which was the better option, again? It was too loud in here to think.
The money seemed safer. His fingers ran over the flimsy notes in his bag, nestled in an interior pocket. Counting, counting again. He couldn’t remember how much it was worth. He remembered Chase’s hands, pressing warm into his own and leaving the money behind.
“Keep it safe,” he’d said. Money was a delicate subject, Buddy knew. Chase himself hadn’t thought it worth his family’s money to go to college himself, though he’d still found himself a place near Deacon and Buddy’s city campus to ‘keep an eye on things’ and ‘make sure they didn’t murder each other.’
Buddy wished he understood better what strings they’d pulled to get him here. It was partly thanks to badgering the local officials until they filed basic documentation for Buddy – Grandpa Ralph had alarming sway among the elder population of the town, and Chase had concocted a disturbingly detailed tale about Buddy’s parents raising him off the grid in the woods outside of town, until their tragic disappearance in a bear-related accident or… something along those lines. He seemed to have an answer for everything, so eventually the people tired of asking. Surprisingly, that was enough to carve out a valid place for him in the world. It was… certainly less than legal. He would never complain about it, though. Chase’s family had given him a second chance at life.
The rest of it was down to some unseen evil called a ‘student loan’. Buddy understood enough to know that it was a problem for later in his life. For now, he could just focus on studying (and learning how to be a real person again).
Buddy hesitantly loaded food onto his tray. Mostly desserts, but he grabbed one or two more solid-looking items as an afterthought. In his defence, the queue moved very fast and he was basically running off sheer instinct. And his instincts were hungry for chocolate.
In a blur of hands and faces and stumbling footsteps, he managed to pay, return the tray, and escape with his food to the tree he’d chosen earlier.
Buddy stared numbly for a moment at the five-odd things he’d bought, his brain slowly returning to its usual range of function. He shook his head a little, realising he was supposed to eat. He started with dessert – after all, there was no one there to stop him.
As a pleasant surprise, he found the rest of the school day easier to manage with a full stomach. Even after he got back to his dorm, scandalising Violet with the trace of chocolate he’d surely had beside his mouth all day, he felt confident it was a very fair trade.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Deacon blinked slowly, wondering if the entire day had just been a stress dream. Most people probably just called those nightmares, but when you were having them like, every other night, it required a separate category. Most of Deacon’s dreams were stress dreams.
He rubbed his squinting eyes, but no – the scene before him remained the same.
It was, thankfully, still the same dorm room he’d left this morning. Staying overnight for the first time was a bit weird, but not as weird as Chase barging in at seven on the dot to ‘make sure Buddy was ready for school.’ Did he think Buddy was five??? At least he’d managed to convince Chase out of waiting here until their classes were over.
No, what was throwing him for a loop this disappointingly warm autumn evening was… okay, sure, something he should’ve noticed last night.
Was Buddy’s blanket fucking glowing?
As he stared, he decided that wasn’t actually the weirdest bit, considering Chase had given it to him. With a sense of calm resolution, he decided it was way weirder that Buddy was already asleep at six-thirty pm, in a pitch-black room, with every scrap of linen on his bed whirled into some unholy bird’s nest.
Well. Time to wake the kraken.
Deacon flicked on the light.
Three demonic hisses of varying pitch sounded into the illuminated room. Buddy was the obvious one, glaring out from his cocoon of blankets. How was he not overheating underneath all that? Deacon swore there were some clothes on the bed, too.
Regrettably, Deacon had neglected to consider the room’s other two occupants – as Chase had taken to saying, ‘smaller doesn’t mean less important!’
Violet looked more than ready to remind him. Bronze’s expression was… uninterpretable, given he’d sat up with his entire upper body still covered by Terrence. Terrence didn’t look pleased, either, though.
Deacon sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Okay, guys, I guess class is in session again. Did no one consider that we are in fact at college, and that college students are night owls with like… upsetting amounts of homework to do?” He threw his backpack into the room, flopping onto the floor somewhere near where it landed. “I thought convincing my mom to let me try the writing course would be the hard part, fuck. Not… actually doing it.”
From somewhere within the shroud, Buddy concurred. “The students should revolt against the faculty. We could overwhelm them, as the homework overwhelms us.”
Deacon scrunched up his face. “Ugh, I am not excited for you to interact with other drama nerds. Christ.”
“So says the nerd.”
That one got a tiny snort out of Bronze. Guess it was genetic.
Violet had vanished, likely within the wooden walls of her delicately painted dollhouse. Also, likely, to plot her revenge upon Deacon’s bloodline (read: sulk). With the floor clear, Deacon rolled across the meagre length of their room to the side of Buddy’s bed. Buddy frowned down at him, eyes heavy with sleep. “Astounding lack of effort from someone who just accused me of laziness.”
Deacon waved a hand, as if batting the hatred away. “No, listen, that’s different. I’m here to figure out what the fuck is going on with your blanket.”
Buddy clutched it nearer, as if afraid Deacon would take it away. Yikes.
“I’m not gonna… okay, whatever. Is it glow in the dark paint?”
Buddy squinted, posture relaxing slightly. “Maybe?”
Deacon slowly reached out his hand to lift the nearest corner, channelling his best ‘Boris please don’t rip my arm off’ expression. Calm. Direct. Predictable. The thin fabric of the duvet cover felt soft even where the specks of light had appeared. Whatever Chase did to it, it was admittedly solid work.
Buddy snaked an arm out of the blanket nest to point at a specific spot. “Chase let me paint that one. They’re stars.” Faced with Deacon’s finest ‘well obviously’ expression, Buddy rolled his eyes and elaborated. “Chase thought I might be scared of the dark. Library basement used to be way darker, but I still think it’s nice. They’re different colours, too.”
“Oh, I bet that’s why you only got to do one.” Deacon laughed. “Chase gets so particular about ‘spacing’ and ‘visual balance’ and shit. Do yourself a favour – if he ever asks you to decorate a Christmas tree with him, get out.” Deacon shivered. “Literally no one understands how he wants it to look but him. Don’t even try, man.”
Buddy nodded thoughtfully, seeming to file this away to deconstruct later. With a considerable air of suspicion, he posed a question of his own. “What’s an email?”