+hugoxcabret
Hugo’s hands faltered briefly before he returned to oiling the gears. As he continued now, though, his attention was intentionally and distinctly focused completely on his work. “My father was a clockmaker,” he said. “He would bring home spare gears for me to play with. I used to make little clockwork figures and he would put them out on display on his desk,” he smiled slightly at the memory. The smile wavered, and he swallowed and popped a mechanism into place harsher than he intended. “When my uncle took me in,” his words were careful and controlled, “I learned how to take care of the clocks, and it became my job to continue.”
She caught the hesitation and nearly grimaced. She hadn’t meant to upset the other. But it was cool to hear how his dad had taught him all these things, and how he had a job with something he seemed to be good at.
"That’s nifty,“ she finally said, smiling faintly and resting her chin on her knees. "When I was a kid, my nanny used to just bring me old McDonalds toys her kids were done with."
Hugo nodded slightly, calming down as he readjusted the mechanism he’d pushed too far. “I’ve always wanted to go to McDonalds,” he mused to himself. “It always looked fun from the outside.” He remembered watching children, hand-in-hand with their parents, clutching toys and bags with red M’s pass by through the face of the clocks in the train station. At first he’d felt jealous, felt a sense of longing for a parental figure to take him out for a treat and a toy. But soon enough he figured out that it was too painful to wish for things he could never have, so he would just look away when he saw those kinds of things. He’d tried to come in once, when he thought he’d collected enough for something small to eat in the brightly-lit restaurant. But he’d been chased out for being too dirty. "Your nanny sounds nice,” he said to distract himself from the thought.
