“It’s way past your bedtime.” From Charles
“No, it’s not.”
It absolutely is, and Charles knows it, and by the look on her face, Riley clearly knows it too. Her innocent expression cracks pretty quickly, and she can’t help the little smile.
She holds up the book in her hand, one of the ones he’s having her read as part of home schooling. Between her physical mutation and her shrinking desire to live with her wings crushed against her back and the fact she could be dragged back to Kentucky if she’s found because she’s technically a runaway until she can convince a judge to emancipate her, it’s not like she can go to regular school. But she still needs to get a high school diploma -- or a GED or whatever -- so Charles is helping.
It’s only been a couple of weeks since Erik got her to admit that no, she actually didn’t manage to graduate super early, but she already feels like she’s learned more than she ever did back at home. Her old home. This is home now.
“I actually like this one,” she explains. She shows him the cover, and it’s Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. There’s a few sheets of paper on the coffee table that she’s been using to take notes so she can talk about the story with him later.
“I’m almost done. And there’s this part that, hold on,” she turns back through the book, leaving her index finger on the page where she’s currently reading, and she reads aloud once she finds the passage she’s looking for.
“When someone is searching then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search. Searching means: having a goal. Finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
Riley looks up at Charles. “I like that part.” She smiles, and it still feels awkward on her face, but she means it.
She doesn‘t say it because she thinks it sounds weird and she’s trying really hard to be a good student and not ask stupid questions or say stupid things. But she thinks she was a finder when she left home and that’s how she ended up here. She didn’t have any plan beyond get out of Kentucky and get as far away from Harlan as possible. She took a break that day she met Erik because she wasn’t going somewhere, she didn’t have anywhere she needed to be, so she pulled over and went flying for the first time.
If she had been searching for a new life, she would have been intent on reaching a big city and getting someone to hire a minor and pay her under the table until she was eighteen and no one could come looking for her. She would have been making a plan to convince someone to rent an apartment to a sixteen year old girl because she only had her driver’s license and not a fake ID that said she was eighteen.
But she hadn’t been a searcher. She had been a finder, which led her here. To Erik, who she calls dad in the privacy of her head. He bandaged her torn wing and offered her a home. To Charles, who had not hesitated to welcome her. To Ororo, who agreed to share her bedroom with a stranger, even if she was unhappy about it at the state. To Vivian and Gwen. To Peter. To X. To this moment, Charles chiding her for being downstairs past her bedtime.
It would sound weird to say all that. She probably would mess it up, too, the words would get all jumbled as they come out because her brain is thinking them too fast and her mouth can’t keep up. And there’s always the chance that Erik is the only one who thinks of her as a member of his family, no matter how nice Charles is and how much Ororo and Vivian have come around to the idea.
Gwen is little enough that she wanted another sister because she loved her two actual sisters so much. And maybe it’s because he’s the only boy, but if Peter didn’t want her around at first, she hadn’t been able to notice it.
She has been meticulously avoiding X as much as possible. He didn’t want her here at all, and he’s one of the adults, so she thinks he would be able to convince Erik and Charles if he decided she needed to go. She knows it’s better to keep your head down and stay out of the way and resist the urge to rock the boat hard enough to know how much it can take before it capsizes.
Yeah. It would be weird to try to explain all of that, and she doesn’t want to make trouble and rat out people for not being the most hospitable housemates when she first arrived.
So she just shrugs. “I just think it is a cool way to show how there’s a difference between looking for something specific and being open to things that come your way. The writing is really good.” She shrugs again and sits up properly, folding the sheets of paper with her notes and sticking them in the book as a makeshift bookmark.
“I lost track of time. I’m sorry. I’ll go to bed.” She gets up and rubs at her tired eyes, leaning over to turn the light off. “Um, I think I can get my math homework done tomorrow so we can go over it tomorrow night. If you’re not busy. It’s just math, though, so it’s fine if you’re busy or what,” she hastens to say. “I can check it myself and figure out what I did wrong.”
She frowns at her own anxiety and scuffs her socked ankle against the carpet. “I’ll talk to you in the morning. Night, Charles.”
@wickedwritingswickedgame @immavampirekiwi (just to make sure you see this and it doesnt get lost in tumblr’s trash tagging system)
