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Who: Dustin Espinosa & Lucy Simon
When: Monday, December 17th / 4:30am
Where: Coins Girls Common Area
What: A book trade. Lucy draws for a sleepy Dustin.
Warnings: Rated T for True Suffering.

Nightmorning has arrived. It’s very early, and earlier than Lucy had imagined. She’d expected at least a week before a summons, if ever. Because of the weekend. Homework. Training. Exploration. Life at Finchwood is strange and busy and full of good excuses to not do things, after all. Maybe a part of her had assumed (hoped?) one wouldn’t come at all.

But Dustin is in the common room with her right now, at four thirty in the morning, on the little couch near the Senior Girls’ room. It’s not strange for Lucy to be in here at this hour, but it’s strange for her to have this kind of guest, and it’s very strange for her to be offering up her possessions like this. Copies of Orlando and To the Lighthouse and (shyly) The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf are stacked on the table in front of them. There are sketchbooks and art things, too, hidden in the tote at her feet, as if in the hope that Dustin will forget she agreed to draw for him. It’s not that she hates the idea, exactly. She doesn’t, or she wouldn’t have brought them at all.

Lucy just thinks, sitting here with him in the semi-dark, leftover glitter in her hair from yesterday’s performance, that not hating it is probably what makes it worthy of hatred after all. A staple of contrariness. He’d understand the feeling if she tried to put it into words, but luckily she’d had the foresight to expressly forbid that they talk at all during this meeting. No smiles and no words had been the promise, yet there is still the smallest hint of a smile in her smudged eyes when she pushes the books toward him, gesturing with a little flourish of a hand as if to say please accept.

It would be disingenuous of Dustin to suggest that 4:30 was his usual wake up time. Normally, and to his roommates’ eternal dismay, his alarm goes off at 5 — waking him with the sun in the summer and well before it when the weather turns cold. But no one stays awake until the morning unless they have to, he’s realised, and so, he's been pushing back his day in the hopes of catching Lucy before she went to bed.

And even this late was a stretch. She must be so busy to stay up past 4, he thinks. He's lucky to have caught her.

So now, here he is, in the girl’s Coin’s common room. There are books on the table and Dustin smiles warmly, opens his mouth to say 'Thank you and here, have this in return.' He remembers the moratorium on speech in time, but the smile stays, smaller now, but relatively unrestrained, as he slides over his trade: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus, Unbound.

Lucy blinks at the smile, grateful to have the book to look at instead. She's read this one once, when she was likely far too young for it. Her father likes Shelley. This is something she would tell Dustin if they were talking: how beautiful was the curse placed on Jupiter. But how optimistic, the ending.

She taps the cover with the nail of her index finger, considers, then touches both hands briefly to her heart. In this moment she realizes something she hadn't accounted for — which is that, in truth, the silence of the hour makes everything feel much louder, larger. She suddenly feels quite vulnerable, like she's sitting in a spotlight, but she's so tired. Instead of closing off and looking away again, she laughs softly, wrinkling her nose. This is silly, isn't it?

But she made up the rules, so she won't abandon them. She's quiet again, reaching over to flip open the cover of To The Lighthouse and indicate a note inside with listed page numbers. Favorite passages, Lucy attempts to communicate with a waggle of her fingers.

Lucy is lucky; normally, Dustin would tilt his head at her gesture, trying to puzzle out what it was, exactly, that she loved. Instead, he just holds back laughter of his own as he pulls out a chair.

Nightmorning has slipped between his ears and his thoughts feel slow and sticky as molasses in a way that leaves him, unusually, disinclined to analyse anything. Of course, this was the magic of it: the strange shiver of exhaustion, the soft ache behind your eyes that comes with every blink, and the rare and wonderful stillness in your brain that finally allows small feelings their due.

Dustin slides the To The Lighthouse over slightly, keeping it partway between the two of them. He’s not fluent enough in finger wiggle to intuit its exact meaning, but it’s not hard to see that these are page numbers. And that they’re special. He flips to the first one on the list.

Lucy makes a tiny sound under her breath, a huff as if in exasperation, but really this is a thing she loves to do. The proof is in the tiny star next to the passage, which begins halfway down page 14. Charles Tansley is with Mrs. Ramsay on the street. She caresses the paragraphs, drawing her finger beneath them:

"... when all at once he realized it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.
With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair— He took her bag.
"Good-bye Elsie," she said, and they walked up the street, she holding her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag."

The silence, again. Lucy breathes it in. She shrugs, looking at Dustin with sidelong eyes, through her lashes. It's hard to describe why these words are so captivating. Maybe this was a stupid idea, but now she has an even worse one: she holds a finger up at him to wait, then bends to retrieve a notebook and pen. They slap a little too loud against the top of the table.

Pretty, Lucy scrawls on an empty page. Then she rolls her eyes at herself, adding, ...obviously.

Dustin’s focus is on the text, so much so that he doesn’t even notice Lucy glancing over. He’s reading slowly, painfully slowly, running his own finger over each line just behind Lucy’s and mouthing the words. Trying to give it the consideration it deserves. He had hold of her bag.

The sound of the paper against the table makes startles him, but even if he were naturally twitchy, he wouldn’t have the energy to jump. He looks up placidly, then down at the page. Fishes in his pockets for a pen of his own and, not finding any, carefully, almost delicately, pulls Lucy’s from her fingers to respond.

Yes, he writes and for a few seconds, he unselfconsciously lets that stand alone because what she’s said was true, he agrees, and it’s all he really has to say. His pen moves back to the book and although he refrains from actually annotating in it, he does come close to underlining the part that makes his heart inexplicably pick up:

...looked at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride…

Complicated, he adds, referring not to the passage, but the feeling it evokes. You get one word before he waxes poetic.

The precise carefulness of Dustin's fingers as he borrows the pen reverberates in Lucy. Her heart flutters stupidly, shiningly, so she smiles without meaning to, a private little twist of the mouth as he points out the words to her. But the fluttery softness of the feeling is poisonous. Embarrassing. Lucy Simon is not fluttery or soft. She doesn't want to be.

So she reaches for the pen back, and — in defiance of these things — lets her fingers brush his experimentally as she gathers it in them again. It's a momentary, negligible caress, but in it she realizes she's been holding her breath. It comes out in a tiny sigh as she retreats back to the notebook to add words around his. Writing legibly is a good distraction from the thorns and prickles of self-hatred.

The paper soon reads i like Complicated. i like the way this interaction happens in life and in him // outwardly and inwardly

She punctuates with a doodle of a little violet just to keep from having to look at Dustin again for one more moment.

Their hands touch and Dustin looks at Lucy — smiles good-naturedly, bumps her elbow with his. Fully aware that something has happened here but, in the spirit of nightmorning, willing to just accept it as an action and not overthink. The longer they stay here, the longer he’s awake, the more the serenity fades; but it’s not gone yet and he’s oxymoronically determined to staple peace down for the duration of their strange little meeting.

It’s really too bad he ruins it by speaking. “Oh,” he exhales as he watches Lucy draw, quiet voice made loud by its previous absence. “Your art.” He’d nearly forgotten.

Lucy manages a total non-reaction to the bump of Dustin's elbow, despite a bad urge to bump him back with her own. And her elbow is very sharp.

But he speaks, so she stops scribbling in the little dark patches on the flower's drooping petals, and finally turns to look at him with tired eyes.

"We had an agreement," she whispers, chiding. Its drollness is laced with a silvery tilt of actual annoyance. It doesn't actually matter. This is just what she knows how to do: it's defense mechanisms all the way down.

Still, she must concede. Now that the silence is broken it might be worse to leave it that way. "But it's so late-early. I won't deny you."

Lucy stares with muted intensity as she closes the notebook and pushes To The Lighthouse back at Dustin, as if making some sort of point (also unknown to her, frankly). Her gaze only lowers as she retrieves a larger, more official sketchbook from the depths of her bag, but this she rests on her lap rather than the table before drawing slightly closer to him. She opens the cover and angles with her knees so that he can see.

The page on the left, closest to Dustin, contains the millionth iteration of an ink piece something like this. The other is blank. She focuses on it, mind suddenly equally blank, then sweeps her hand over it, whispering half to him and half to the paper.

"What do you want? A portrait?" Lucy's fingers swirl. "A message from the ether?"

“Not a portrait,” Dustin replies, raising his hands a little in defense. He looks as even-tempered as usual, but there’s a grain of real anxiety there. Don’t look at him, please.

The ink catches his eye and he tilts his head and leans in, examining the piece as he murmurs, “A message from the ether would be nice.”

Lucy smiles and makes a little hum of agreement. A message. Sure.

It would be easy and fun to be mean to Dustin.

She could draw anything right now, in slow motion: softly sketch out a caricature or a stylized dickbutt to the backdrop of quiet serene morning. Select an image of beauty, just troubling enough in its symbolism that perhaps he'll worry over it privately like an ill omen. But she won't. She kind of wants to. Almost as much as she wishes she could do other things.

She takes the pen and begins to draw him a wreath of imaginary wildflowers instead, hand quick and confident. Mistakes and misplaced lines are bandaged with snarls of ivy and wavy movement. It's suggestive of hair, maybe. Or water.

"I'm thinking about the things we said," she tells him, honest. "In the journal, the last time we spoke. That's what this is a picture for."

She shrugs. "I've made other art about our conversations before."

Lucy may not have realized it in the moment, but Dustin, ever the masochist, responds the same way to pretty much all taunts. Small shrug, small smile. Polite laughter to show that, ah yes, he sees the joke, and very little behind his eyes. If she wanted to get a rise out of him, ironically enough, this was a much better way to do it.

He draws his chair over so that she’s sitting behind her left shoulder and watches as flowers bloom between sleepy blinks. It too, is pretty, ... obviously. Dustin thinks about grass.

“You’re easily inspired,” he says with a laugh, ducking his head, then adds. “I’d love to see them sometime.” It’s hard to strike the right balance between ‘interested’ and ‘low pressure’ here, but he tries.

The words are sweet and bland and inoffensive and irritating. Easily inspired. Meaningless.

Lucy's drawing grows just slightly sharp, bristly. She presses out a few particularly irritable tulips, exhales, then leans her weight against the back of the couch. Her head lolls against it for a rest, and she turns to gaze at him over her shoulder, bright hair tousled against the fabric of the cushions.

"Do you mean that, or is it just something you're saying because it's nice?" She asks, in a soft, easy tone, as if asking to borrow a pencil. She murmurs under her breath then — "little star" — and bites her lip into her mouth before going back to her inane drawing. Little drips of shining black blood. They could be petals, but they aren't.

“It was an observation,” Dustin replies, tone equally mild. He has a sudden, inexplicable urge to press a finger into the still-drying ink. “Not a compliment.”

Maybe he doesn’t find their conversations worthy of artistry. Maybe he thinks the volume undermines the value. Or maybe he means exactly what what it says on the tin. “But it could be a compliment too.”

"It could be," Lucy agrees, mild in turn.

She slashes a very small x into the negative space in the very center of the wreath, though she doesn't quite understand what it means. That annoys her, too.

"I'm trying not to make assumptions about you."

“That puts you above most,” he says, trying — perhaps in vain — to catch her eyes. This time, it’s definitely a compliment.

Dustin runs a thumb over the edge of the page, a little too close, but nowhere near where Lucy is drawing. Somehow, he avoids a paper cut. He thinks about their earlier conversation, the one that inspired this meeting. About the choices that go into Lucy’s art; the thought or absence thereof.

“How are you deciding?” He asks. “What to draw.”

That puts you above most. Lucy is perceptive enough to sense that Dustin must (might?) be looking at her, but she doesn't look back at him again. She's too busy shading away a sense of dread. There's going to be a straight up pool of blood at the bottom of the page by the time she's finished.

"I don't know. It's like translating." She hums again, watching his finger move along the paper. "We talked about potential. I felt a circle." Lucy ceases a cascade of stippling, pushing her fingernail along the ring of flowers. "It doesn't start or end. The plants do, but that cycle is potential, too. It grows. Sometimes it dies or changes shape."

"A wreath says welcome, to me," she adds, halting. "And everything else is... I don't know yet. Maybe I will when I look at this later. Sometimes it's just a fleeting... thing. Sometimes it just looks nice."

“Sometimes it just looks nice,” Dustin repeats, soft voice tinged by the faintest, faintest hint of amusement. He’s not laughing at her, not in the slightest. It’s just that that part, of course, he understands.

Lucy’s explanation makes sense to him, and he lets a comfortable silence fall for a moment as he watches her draw. “I’m afraid your flowers are drowning,” he adds, eyes flicking down to the puddle of what he hasn’t quite recognised as blood.

"Ah. Hmmm."

Lucy pauses, moving to hold the book at arm's length. She playfully pretends to survey the image as though Dustin's is a groundbreaking observation — but then something occurs to her, and she lowers it to continue her work with a gentleness.

"Perhaps they're feeding," she murmurs to him. A dark twist. But it feels right.