Everything Has Changed || Colorwild
"Oh," Isaac set the basket off to the side as he went to join Nick, curious but it wasn't only that; there was a lot of weight connected to that simple statement.
Only a few years ago he had no doubt Nick would have disappeared from town whenever the whim hit him to do so, because that had simply been the life he lived. He'd explained it to Isaac, how the wind and that impulse always called to him, like it was some underlying fear that somewhere out in the world there was some bigger story he was missing out on If he remained too long in one spot.
At the time, so early in what would become their relationship, Isaac had taken it as a subtle way of Nick telling him that there could be nothing serious between them, that there would always be something out in the world that called to him with more strength behind it than anything he found in that town. Or anything he found in the people there.
Isaac had accepted it for a while, because he couldn't imagine getting past his own history to want anything stable with anyone else. But what he did want was stability in other ways; he'd never been able to fully understand the way Nick looked to the wind to lead him to new tales and adventures because Isaac was a different sort of person. His own adventures had led him back home and that was where he was happy.
And even years later there were times he felt the little guilt at wondering if Nick being happy there was still really as happy as Nick could be, or if he was just holding back for the sake of what they had built.
It was just an ID but it also wasn't; because Nick had always been a million different people but he never quite been himself in the way that that little document solidified he was.
He glanced over Nick's shoulder at the ID, standing there behind him, leaning against him some and running his fingers through the other man's hair, sifting streaks of subtle teal through the brown strands with his fingertips.
"You don't have to be," he voiced, "fine, I mean. It's a big thing."
@wilde-fun
For a moment, Nick closed his eyes and let out a slow silent breath, letting himself absorb the quiet comfort of Isaac's touch.
There were times he felt too much like the Wind he'd followed - a collection of leaves and seeds and dust being blown together into a loose sort of shape by air currents and the moment, held together by chance and just as likely to fall apart again. Built out of what had fallen away or been shaken off, the drifting chaff of greater beings. Words and thoughts blended until it wouldn't take much to blow him apart. Sometimes he wondered what that would be like.
But that little touch provided a focus point in the swirl until it felt like it could touch down again - the seed that would become rooted, the leaves that would become mulch, the dust that would hold other plant life. Grounded. At least until the next strong breeze came through.
He let out another sigh, slightly more audible, and leaned back into the touch.
"It's just. Odd. When Mom and I first came here, we didn't have any ID. We didn't even know what that was. But we were poor enough it didn't matter - ID really only became useful if you wanted to go somewhere else. When you were working under the table and avoiding the cops to keep ahold of your housing anyway, it didn't matter. It was years before I needed an ID for anything, and by then everyone I knew had fakes anyway."
He let out a small laugh. "Even then I didn't use my real birth date on it. I was already too old."
@isaac-morey
For a moment all Isaac could do was listen; Nick had no shortage of stories to offer the world but seldom ones that were true about himself. For someone who had lived a lifetime long enough to spread across several it was the details at times that Isaac couldn't always keep up with, or more of that he wasn't always certain which version of the truth was the one Nick offered to other people.
There were things that Nick didn't tell him either, he knew that; things that the other man might have felt could change his opinions or catch him off guard even though Isaac like to think it wouldn't be the case. And even if it was he also liked to think the worst of Nick still had reasons, and the worst of him was in the past. He saw more often than he liked to admit the glimpses of it in the paranoia and the heavy lines Nick would draw when it came to safety, uncertainty; haunted little things.
So for many of those stories Isaac just listened, the same as he just listened then while Nick explained another part of his history that had taken place in a time before Isaac, a time he wouldn't have known what to do himself because it was a different world.
Just like that world, the one that was so familiar to him because it was what he had been born into wasn't quite Nick's world; and it wasn't very often the divide felt obvious but every now and then with little things he saw it.
"I guess it feels a little different now then, being you officially," he noted, although he didn't actually press about how much of his real name Nick had used or opted not to; the world had always been difficult for Magicks who weren't human and still was in a way that was outside the things he'd experienced.
Most of the life that Nick had lived was far outside of anything Isaac had experienced, but he didn't do a lot of comparing because Nick never made him feel like there was any reason to compare.
The legalities he knew were also complicated, Belle had stepped in to help untangle those along the way but even he wasn't sure what it actually was going to mean being an elf recognized under Mundus laws.
It was another of those things that felt like something they were figuring out along the way.
"Have you talked to your mom about it yet?" Nick had only just gotten the ID so that wasn't quite what he meant, more if he had talked to her along the way, because she was probably one of the few people who had as much insight about it all from that point of view.
@wilde-fun
