« And I just hate the fact that I now know what Berluti shoes are, eh? But I suppose we all have to live with certain things. » His lips twitched in amusement, a sour-candy puckering. The student turned on his heels, produced some cup half-tipping over in the grass, dutifully discarded there a few moments ago, and drained it straight up. He rinsed his mouths with its content. Then, Camille reverted to the tall, tense boy before him: he had the color of white river stones, the round ones children always pore over. His eyes were light blue, blank, bland.
He’d briefly appraised the leather jacket — a conscientious fashion choice if he’d ever seen one — before speaking once more. « Abel. You play for the rugby team, don’t you? Grizzly things. » Even as he asked that, he still had his smile plastered on, not to soften the blow but rather to make it worth its money. A part of him would’ve liked to slump down in the greensward, carefully trimmed, to lay his head on the ground in whichever way it could carry it. But the overruling part, which always tugged on the reins as soon as he was out of his room, steered him into questions, third-party quarrels, trinket curiosities. And the canine-looking person which had simply stumbled over here could be all of those. It wasn’t that Camille found flesh and blood to be more interesting than whatever dead Irish kings his books held for him. It wasn’t that he didn’t, either. Rather, it was this world and the other, twin night pools one can step into. Separate and adjacent.
Bas had understood that, once. How you can live among and yet somehow beyond at the same time, how it is all a game of locative prepositions, but ever since Bas he didn’t bother explaining it. Too much poetics in the ring of it, and secondhand ones, too. As if dissociation and escapism weren’t different things since the beginning of time. Besides, how could this one, arms crossed in a challenge his mind didn’t even form yet, see the sense in it? Or in anything else, at that. Camille almost made to touch him, break up the tight link of Abel’s arms. As you were, kid, he felt like saying, already senselessly wizened for his age by just this present moment.
"There was a point you had never heard of them? Some are just born luckier than others, I see." Abel, a person who just did not GET the whole shopping thing, meant a person who had never heard of the oh so coveted handcrafted shoes Berluti put out was the lucky one. He did not specify that. He preferred to let people assume one thing or the other anyway, to fill in the blanks themselves. It wasn't as if he had a pair anyway, they were just shoes. He watched, head tilted, as Camille righted himself. Any other time he would have turned and gone about the rest of his day no other thought spared to what happened here, or Camille. He had things to do after all. Reading, studying, not being here at this very moment, he really needed to check on Theo as well...
Before he was able to turn and be on his way, going about his life and being better for it Camille spoke again. Questioned him really. There were a lot of things that Abel would be able to count as weaknesses of his -- not that he'd say that out loud -- one of them happened to be talking about accomplishments. Even more so when those accomplishments didn't come on the tail end of something someone else in his family had already done. Being on the Rugby team was one of those things. It wasn't common, not for underclassmen to be on the field anyway. And he was. So, yes. It was a question that caught his interest.
Abel even nearly visibly perked up, straightening his stance and looking a bit more engaged. For a moment, until he remembered himself and returned to his more standoffish demeanor. "Yes, I am. Why?" he asked simply, furrowing his eyebrows in suspicion. "Perhaps grizzly compared to sitting around and working on the school newspaper, or my grandmother's knitting circle."
