Neil x Protagonist the possibility of their first meeting how it happened!
Hello! Thanks for the prompt! I hope this lives up to expectations x
Paradise - or Heaven, if you were into that sort of thing - must be a library with floor to ceiling shelves lined with books in every single language remembered and forgotten. Every story ever told over a campfire, between the half-worlds of sleep and waking, or put to paper and words captured in each one. This library would be all warm dark panelled wood and comfortable leather armchairs gone soft with age and use, with big windows that let in dull sunlight.
Neil thinks he would like that very much.
It certainly would be a better option than the alternative which was being in a brutal modernist building with humming fluorescent lights, hard plastic chairs and metal shelves that smelled faintly of rust, cramming away at his studies amongst the congregation of end of the semester zombies. Neil rubs the heel of his palms into his eyes hard enough to see stars popping up in the darks of his eyelids.
“Here.” Neil jumps, eyes blinking rapidly as he looks up to see a smiling stranger placing a paper cup of sweet, sweet bitter nectar. The logo speaks of one of the better establishments on campus and when he wraps his hands around it, he thinks he could cry from the warmth.
“May I sit?” The stranger asks, gesturing to the seat opposite his. Mouth parting, gaping elegantly like a fish, Neil gestures. Yes, please handsome stranger who is dressed in a tailored three-piece suit at 7 in the morning on a Thursday while I look like a drowned raccoon. Please do sit with me.
Neil ducks his head, drinking his coffee. It was the good kind from the good place and his brain has a second to pause to consider. “Are you going to kidnap me? Is there... Did you put something in this?”
The stranger laughs, deep and hush in the quiet. For some unfathomable reason, Neil feels his heart flips and flops at the way the light dances on his brown skin and he finds himself following the amused lips of the man’s lips as it parts to reveal the whites of his teeth. There are crinkles around the man’s eyes and a few streaks of grey in his neatly trimmed beard but none of that tells him who this man was and why he had brought him coffee.
“No, Neil,” The stranger says, reaching into his coat pocket, he pauses. Dark eyes flicker to him for a beat before pulling out a red string. Smiling still, he leans forward and Neil mirrors him. The stranger takes one of Neil’s hands, looping an end of the string around his little finger and the other end around his own.
Neil exhales a soft huff of breath. Looking deep into the stranger’s eyes, he thinks he sees some curious possibility, some weird knowing that reminds him suddenly of that paradise of infinite knowledge in them that sends his stomach swooping through the floor below his ratty Converses. “I’m here to make a proposition to you.”
ellievsbear
