Logs:Excused Absences

Excused Absences
Dramatis Personae Joshua, Charles, The Vos
In Absentia Erik, [Jax]], Matt, Mirror, Scott, Lily, Dawson, Dusk, Ion, Ryan	2023-10-04 << {I picked it up on holiday in Gibraltar, as you might imagine.} >>
Location <XS> Charles's Study - Third Floor
The reading room tucked into the corner of the suite is much smaller than the one in the mansion's library proper, cozily appointed in polished dark wood and plush burgundy upholstery. The walls are lined with floor-to-ceiling mobile bookshelves, including a climate controlled case beside the antique writing desk and one behind it that conceals a private elevator. A sideboard by the door holds a silver platter with a crystal decanter of scotch and two old fashioned glasses, a pitcher of water, a crystal bowl of peppermint starlights, and a rather space age looking coffee machine(?) beside a fine white porcelain tea set at the far end. There is a small table with an elegant steel chess set in a bright nook beneath one of the windows, flanked by a single chair. It's a quiet evening at the mansion -- at least by its current, overcrowded standards. Charles took supper in his study, probably as much for the relative peace as for the piles of work that have followed him up from his proper office. He's pushed the remainder of that supper aside, half a bowl of white bean soup and a crust of bread, though he keeps a cup of tea near at hand as he shifts his attention seamlessly between two holographic displays, a tablet, and his phone. His navy pinstripe suit is a little rumpled but still sharp, gold satin tie in a full Windsor neat enough to suggest he's retied it at least once, though now he is finally reaching to loosen it -- which in fairness could also be prelude to tying it again. There is nobody outside Charles's door until very abruptly there is. The colorful chaos of Joshua's mind is familiar, if not familiar here -- has he ever visited Charles here at his private suite, it's unlikely. Some very focused part of his mind -- the only very focused part of his mind, really -- is intently studying his phone screen where he is determinedly attempting to find the last few words in today's Spelling Bee. The idle skip of his eyes from letter to letter around the grid spin thoughts off wildly in erratic directions in a haphazard mix of Spanglish and imagery. AORTA << ya encontré >> slams up against a sudden time-anxiety, a fuzzy rifling through a mental calendar that in entirely no way helps him to remember how much time he has left to sign up for continuing education OR get back to work before his license lapses. ADAPTO comes with a sensefeel clenching brief at his heart, a flaying duststorm and a blaze of fire and an oddly calm triage-assessment of the chaos, who am I now and who should I be and this drops away into an irritable frown at the screen: << fuck, right, tiene que ser fucking English >> followed later by a sheepish realization that ADAPT is in fact an English word. RAPTADO << no wait English >> but also, here, a wry amusement mingling with sharp worry that comes shaped like a shivering teenager eyerolling beneath a bright blue hoodie and it's this thought that reminds him, right, he's here now -- << Knock, knock, knock >> comes with no accompanying actual knocking. Mostly because he hasn't put the phone away. He's frowning down at it with an expression that perhaps outwardly looks Very Serious, but is mostly trying to remember how the fuck you spell PHARAOH. Charles conveys his welcome along with the knowledge the door is unlocked, his verbal << Come in >> trailing ever so slightly behind. "P-H-A-R-A-O-H," he supplies aloud, once Joshua has entered. "I never properly welcomed you back what with all the chaos, intramural and otherwise. I hate to imagine how we'd have managed it without you. Would you like some coffee?" He's studying the younger man thoughtfully, waving his holo displays aside, though he leaves the tablet on its stand. "How was your sabbatical? Fruitful, I hope." << Qué chingados está that extra fucking A doing, garbage-ass language. >> Joshua is putting PHARAOH in, grateful for the assist despite his grumping at the vagaries of English spelling. He slips his phone into his pocket after he has claimed those points, closing the door behind himself. He's giving a quite genuine consideration to how they'd have managed without him, halfway through thinking through some complex game plan involving considerable extra work for Matt and Charles both as well as the feasibility of having some of the kids sleep in tents outside until they could perhaps get through a night without accidentally torching, impaling, or otherwise maiming their classmates. He shoves his hands into his pockets, lifting his chin in thankful acceptance of the coffee. His eyes track reflexively to the holo displace and just as reflexively back away. "Extra coffee," when he offers it, is not some kind of a request but his summation of How They Would Have Managed. This spins off into considering how much extra chaos the new kids could have made when hyper-caffeinated -- -- but that distractible thought crashes abruptly into pieces at Charles's innocuous question. Inside his pockets his hands are balling into fists and then slowly unclenching. He's thinking of crisp beers on a stunningly beautiful Thai beach and thinking of acrid-burned coffee stale in an industrial kitchen. Thinking of an impossibly strong hand crunching bonesplitting against his shoulder and chess pieces scattered over a rickety table. << might have to collect your Nobel posthumously >>, impossibly smug, rings up against a sharp-snapped, << next time maybe you'll listen to me >>. Scott's tired eyes actually visible, a gruff << didn't you see my emails? >>. An inbox with so many thousand accusatory unread messages that he simply deleted the entire thing and went back to sleep to worry about that choice Later. A klaxon-blare of alarms ringing dull and distant through a bleak void of barely-there awareness. The children pleading and desperate and scared in front of the cameras at Occupy Lassiter. These images tumble in a chaotic disjointedness that is fairly typical for his scattered mind, not devoid of emotion but not dwelling much, either, on the stresses they bring. What he does fix on is a single bright image, now iconic worldwide; Jax's sun-swallowing armor and gleaming-bright sword and steady gaze tipped up at the forbidding gates of Lassiter. There's grief, here, and fury, and a strange sort of pride (<< lit that fucking match >>) that all end in a tired << fuck >>, an inward wry almost-regret that maybe he should have applied himself better to Psionic Self Defense. He bites briefly at the corner of his mouth. Shrugs a shoulder, pulls back out his phone -- somewhere in the back of his mind Mirror!Karrie's haggard expression and the hazy slow returning of his consciousness has tripped into adding TORPOR to his almost-complete Spelling Bee. One Pangram to go. "Busy." Charles gives a faint and self-deprecating chuckle as he rolls over to the sideboard. "We seriously contemplated Camp Xavier at one point. I suppose it would have been the weather for it, but I am ever so grateful that did not turn out necessary." He starts his absurdly smart coffee machine up and pulls one elegant glass mug from the cupboard beneath it, then another -- -- which slips from his grasp to shatter on the floor as his breath catches on something in the involuntary rush of What Joshua Did This Summer. In the wake of the crash he's briefly frozen in place, the quiet of his study disturbed only by the prosaic mechanical grinding noise from the coffee machine that accompanies the rich aroma filling the room. He swallows and takes up another mug, and by the time he turns back to Joshua his face is -- only a little pale. The warmth of his telepathic aura is stronger now, more present, whispering offers of comfort and support, but what he says is, "Would you like some time off to...recover? I should have thought to offer that in any event after Yom Kippur -- did Scott offer? My apologies, I've not been..." He shakes his head. "I don't just mean from here..." This is annotated by a comically abstracted mental illustration showing the tide of new students slowing to a trickle. "I can talk to FDNY, as well. I doubt it should be too much trouble persuading them to extend your license for --" His lips compress. "-- extenuating circumstances that can remain unspecified." Joshua is giving more serious thought to Camp Xavier, now -- not a necessity born out of too many students too quick but the benefits of mutant summer camp programs for children who need some guidance with their abilities or simply some time around others like them but otherwise could stay in their normal schools. This spins out into so many thoughts about privacy, about security -- he's comparing and contrasting some measures taken by a trans-kids summer camp a friend works at up in New England -- weighing that against additional insurance nightmares -- -- the crash derails his logistical ponderings. His brows hike, and then lower. The sense of apology in his mind is more manners than any sense of particular culpability, and he's slouching over to crouch down, hand brushing feather-light across the shattered glass on the floor. Where he touches the broken bits and pieces simply vanish, and though outwardly an absent casual gesture Xavier can feel the carefully practiced mental targeting underlying it to teleport this all safe and precise away. << ... what the fuck does recovery mean >> is neither targeted at Xavier nor sharp in its tone, an idle self-reflection on his years (and years) (and years) in the labs; of the friends he'd lost there and the ones still clamoring in his mind from all the forced resurrections; of Eli's vibrant warmth and the hole it left in him (of whether the X-Men who left him to die in a cage remember his sharp wit and lively storytelling or whether Matt with his new and improved Power Boosting simply filled the only gap Eli left to them), of bullets riddling him in a chaotic Lassiter hallway and the odd sense of peace within the agony that at least it's not those kids. He's thinking of Yom Kippur, too; of the deeply compartmentalized clarity of life-and-death emergencies, of the (terrifying) (awesome) force of slipping into Jax's skin and Jax's devastating power; of the desperate struggle to contain that power with his concrete-cracked skull and a living dust storm choking his life away; of the dissonant amusement of saying the shema and wondering to himself how many times this year he'll say his Last Prayers. He's sort of idly thinking over the heart attack Scott might have if he asked for another vacation after his "vacation", but together with this amusement there's a lively spill of imagery -- clinking bottles with Lily on a warm beach, spiced cocoa sitting with his grandmother on her porch looking out at the breathtaking mountain scenery, pleasant rock-climbing ache in his muscles as his sister belays him up a cliff, a mellow open-air folk concert on a pleasant Tel Aviv night, the sun glimmering off the water as he and Leo crack open beers and wait for the fish to bite. << I'm recovering. >> "... State DOH handles my cert." He straightens, checking his palm with habitual care and dropping it to his side when he's satisfied that there's no broken glass-dust on the floor or him. He's acknowledging the strong psionic warmth with a quiet politeness that neither rejects it nor leans into it, a thanks and an I'm good all at once. He still does want the coffee, though. "Came to ask a different favor." "Oh, you don't have to..." Possibly, Charles was going to tell Joshua to just leave the glass because He Has Drones For That or something along those lines, but the objection melts into a faintly embarrassed gratitude that freezes again at Joshua's memory of the attack on Freaktown last week. He had almost managed to set the replacement mug safely down, but with a sudden startled jerk of his fingers, it capsizes and rolls right off the edge of the sideboard to explode on the floor Joshua had just cleaned. "Bloody hell." This is addressed somewhat flatly to the broken glass as his psychic aura shivers with conceptual light, then quickly settles. "I don't suppose," he says, lifting his eyes to Joshua as he reassembles his fallen expression into something like a sheepish smile, "you would mind doing that again?" The fourth mug he pulls out and places directly into the dispensing alcove of the coffee machine, and after settling the first mug carefully beside that he himself deftly out of Joshua's way. Conveniently, this also puts the mugs safe beyond his reach. "I've a certain tendency to interpose myself when I'm not needed, which isn't half so bad as not being there when I am." Behind the quiet dignity that Charles dons with seemingly thoughtless ease there is something Joshua hasn't seen before. "But I do remember." Though this attends a flash of Eli -- brief and bright and yes, warm -- it encompasses dozens of others, hundreds. Most are strangers to Joshua, but it's easy to pick out Dawson, Peace, Dusk, and Ion. "I remember everyone, and ought to have learned better from them, long ago." He bows his head. "I am sorry for all the times I'm stood by and let you come to harm." His gaze darts to the coffee machine with a sort of dull relief when it starts dispensing. "And I am glad you were sealed in the Book of Life, after all. Whatever it is you ask --" If he was thinking about qualifying this, the impulse was exceptionally brief. "-- I'll see it done." At Crash Number Two Joshua's brain is habitually recalibrating itself -- is someone hurt, are we under attack, is there danger, an instinctive shift from the vague-uncomfortable-anxiety of remembering Proper Social Behavior to the calm order of evaluating the situation. With a faint internal twitch of disappointment he just as quickly comes to the conclusion that in fact everything is fine. He's crouching to reach for the scattered glass fragments, heavy brows creasing in an idle ponder of whether Charles curses more within the confines of his own mind than he does aloud. Charles's don't suppose you would mind doing that again maps, now, in his mind somewhere to these disjointed musings. << do what again? >> answers itself with a cheerful contrariness: << {make him swear, obviously} >> -- he has to wrangle his brain back deliberately from spinning merrily down a new series of horrifying Recollections just out of sheer curiosity over the reactions it might prompt. He does not, in fact, want to burden Charles's mind with horrors but ultimately it's << {he's out of mugs, that bit is Over} >> that helpfully stops the ADHD Nightmare Train before it has left the station. He's still crouched, scanning the floor for any missed shards that have escaped particularly far. He is flitting absently over Yom Kippur night -- the ludicrous and terrifying hatred of the Nazis, the screams of his people around him, pushing past the instinct to flee in order to buy others a little more time, trying to push past his hurt and stress to make sure Erik was stable only for the elderly Holocaust survivor to take off anyway. "--Well. Ne'ilah you couldn't have predicted," is a quiet admission that some of those other deaths he could, but he's very intentionally not dwelling on Mendeleev and the tortures they went through there, very intentionally instead spinning up Ryan Black's "Master" in his mind. At his side his free is kind of reflexively patting the beat against the floor, some deep ingrained CPR-muscle memory kicking in with the strong bass of the song. "S'a kid." He isn't clarifying this too much but his mind is, Roscoe's sour expressions and guarded smiles, his string of companionably lost chess games, the teenager's heartbreaking acclimatization to the torture labs, a pair of guards facing down -- is that two terrified teenagers, no, it must be just the one -- and the grit of his teeth as he -- how did he yank their murderous attention his way? "Up in Boston." The fucking missing door of Roscoe's bedroom fills him with a disproportionate amount of ire, stoking a brief protective fury that somehow the thought of Lassiter doesn't quite manage to rouse in the same way, and this echoes back over the years to so many Prometheans getting out of one horror only to return to homes and families that refused to understand, that drove the nightmares home. (Somewhere under here there's an ache, bloody-fierce and batwinged, for the caring Promethean community that has been adoptive family for so many -- that might with enough work still be, though never the same.) "-- parents probably need convincing," he finally remembers to get around to the actual favor. That he himself is Not Very Convincing with his deeply embedded anarchist philosophies around education and overall disdain for conventional schooling he admits unselfconsciously. "Thank fuck," Charles murmurs, almost certainly a self-referential gesture of gratitude toward Joshua's skillful steering of his attention rather than a suddenly acquire taste for profanity. At least he's ready for the next flash of Lassiter, and even strings it together chronologically with the earlier flashes of Joshua's death there. His brows furrow deep, then deeper at the familiar song with which he had shared an unfortunate five minutes of fame what feels like a lifetime ago, now. He breathes in, breathes out, and nods slowly. "I'm not so arrogant as to think I can fill those shoes, but at the very least I can give the boy a second home." There's something gentle in the crinkle at the corners of his eyes. "I think he's already got a pretty good start on a second family." He looks past Joshua at the little table by the window, at the chessmen neatly lined up in their starting position. "That's...how this started out, you know," he says, a little absently. "I never altogether stopped thinking of them as my children, but maybe..." He trails off, eyes distant for a moment, then shakes his head. "Forgive an old man his rambling." He rolls back to the coffee machine just as the dispensing changes pitch and starts to tapers off. "I will go personally. I've quite a knack for impressing parents, even if I don't need it often, these days." He reaches for the mugs, then hesitates, glancing back over at Joshua instead. << {This feels at once rude and absurd...} >> The words frame an embarrassed entreaty for his guest to retrieve the mugs. The switch of language probably isn't jarring in itself, but the fact that his particular brand of Spanglish is Llanito might well be. "{...but you understand, no?} >> << {shiiit just caught a legendary goddamn} shiny >> Joshua's eyes have narrowed faintly in reflexive consideration of exactly how rare this might be, which makes his expression look more severe in a strong contrast to the deep and appreciative amusement that swells in his mind. (Somewhere alongside this amusement, Brooklyn 99's Captain Holt is saying, deadpan, "no one will ever believe you".) He follows Charles's gaze towards the chess set, teeth slowly scraping at his chapped lower lip. He's slotting this statement somewhere into his constellation of existing feelings about the school: fucked up in many of the usual school ways, Traditional Classroom Practices terrible for neuroatypical minds and honestly not that stellar for the neurotypical ones either; still, for so many students, the simple facts of having a stable roof, square meals, faculty who actually care about their well being are all incomparably valuable -- and none of it, in his mind, as valuable as having a cheat code to make an impossibly powerful billionaire have a lifelong vested interest in your personal well being. "Mmmn," he sums up, approvingly. Then blinks at Charles's eccentric-ass Spanglish << (that tracks) >> immediately second-guessing into << does it? >>, trying to sort through if he previously had any stereotypes about The Kind Of American Gringo who might know this weird and fading language or if a world of stereotypes simply sprung fully-formed to life the very moment Charles spoke. He's decided there's no point trying to distinguish at approximately the same time he's spun up a new tangent of pondering on the quirks of the dialect -- overlaps with Ladino -- idle resolve to (look into it further)/(ask his Nonna about it) -- -- hang on, he's having a conversation Here And Now. He shelves linguistic curiosity for a future time and retrieves the mugs, with a dim background bracing in his mind (honed perhaps against long friendship with his chaotic roommates) that this would be the perfect timing to psionically jumpscare him. "...how did this start?" He's thinking about the pups, sons-on-paper until it became real, and of Eli's heartbreak-then-excitement at his parents' rejection coming out of Franklin and enrolling at the school on the swift heels of it, of the M-Kids and their well-intentioned disastrous choices, of his own wonderfully supportive parents and their stressful inability to navigate what resources a hostile public school system could offer. "The school," is unnecessary addition but, as a school his mind is clarifying, rather than the ad hoc support networks/chosen family so common among mutants. << {It tracks,} >> Charles assures Joshua easily. << {I picked it up on holiday in Gibraltar, as you might imagine.} >> How Joshua might imagine that is an open question, but how Charles remembers it is sashaying across the stage of a smoky dive in a skin-tight blue sequined dress and gold stiletto heels, wobbly with inebriation but flush with the attention and encouragement and interest of his audience -- Llanito and otherwise -- whose cheers help drown out the inadequacies of his own voice as he sings along to Freddie Mercury, "She's a killer queeeeeen! Gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam; Guaranteed to blow your mind -- any time!" There's something a little smug in his smile, here -- a little wistful, too, and just a touch of apology underneath. "I picked up a few languages, that year. I've always loved learning. On the other side of that coin, I'd always loved teaching." He looks back at the chess table, where fifty years ago a much smaller, sicklier Charles sits across a much fancier chess board from a soft gray Persian kitten, determinedly trying and failing to teach her how to play. "Would you believe school never agreed with me?" He's pretty sure Joshua would, knowing his power as he does. "So when I got the chance to be a teacher, I went about it differently." On a sunny tropical hillside, he's encouraging the mutant teenagers sprawled around him to spin up all manner of delightfully creative bullshit about how the plants around them might have gotten there across thousands of miles of open ocean. "But then, we were going about everything differently, there." He wants to say "Utopia", but can't. Not quite. "Or trying to, anyway. When I started gathering young people under my wing again here, I had to compromise to prepare them for the world of humans." On the other side of the mansion, he's giving Jean her own laboratory for her 16th birthday and she's unself-consciously bending to throw her arms around him with a mental spill of << thank you, Professor! >> "In retrospect, I probably didn't need to get accredited to do that, but I did and it kind of, ah...snowballed, from there." A faint impression here of the current student body, rapidly outgrowing the mansion. "I could tell you some of our early misadventures in pretending to be a proper school, if you like." He rolls over to the chairless side of the chess table, tipping a hand at the board. "Over a game, perhaps?" That is definitely not how Joshua imagined Charles picking up Llanito and it's very clear from the brief but stark bluescreening of his mind, chaotic jumble of thoughts screeching to a halt -- it's not, ultimately, the sequined dress or Charles up out of his chair that trips him up but instead, trying to picture the staid and quiet old man in front of him singing Freddie Mercury's falsetto. Did he drop his coffee? It's vanished from his hand although it hasn't hit the floor. After a very short delay, Joshua is considering that it is, maybe, rude, after the lengths the Professor went through -- successfully! -- to startle him only to be robbed of the satisfaction of the crash. He ambles just slightly closer to the coffee set up, lifting a hand casually to bat a spare mug off the shelf. CRASH. His actual mug, safe and filled still with coffee, reappears in his hand as he just as casually begins cleaning up the new broken glass. He's thinking of Xavier's immensely powerful telepathy, thinking of his own terrifying-headachy-existentially nightmarish attempts to become proficient in it. His << {can definitely believe} >> comes with a wince as he imagines -- then immediately stops imagining -- how much worse school would have been with telepathy. This is swiftly tumbling into a bright curiosity about the cat: << did that work? >> The curiosity is expanding -- about Utopia, about the early school days, at its path from unschooling to Extremely Proper Prep School. He flicks a last shard of glass into its extradimensional trashcan and gets to his feet, sauntering over to drop into the chair opposite Charles. He huffs out a sharp breath that sounds outside entirely unlike a laugh and inside entirely like one. "Gotta warn you. M'shit at chess." --- <BOS> Lucky Coin Laundry. October 19. The Lucky Coin Laundry is a run-of-the-mill laundromat -- just clean enough, just big enough, lined with industrial washers and dryers in various sizes, with a handful of large rolling carts available for customers; one vending machine dispensing soda and one dispensing soap and detergent; a quarter machine. A printout taped to the wall by the service window says that Last Call is at 8:45pm and that there will be an attendant on-duty until 10pm, but right now the service window is shut. On the other side of the service window, the Vos have done their best to be hospitable with very limited means -- My has offered everybody their choice of either pamplemousse, tangerine, or razz-cranberry LaCroix -- but they haven't quite gotten over the embarrassment of inviting a billionaire into the office/storage unit/wash-'n'-fold room. My is paging through a brochure without reading it, not ricocheting between any of half a dozen stray concerns so much as twining threads of them into a binding certainty that this will backfire as badly as every other thing they've tried, that Roscoe is slipping from her grasp even now that she has him back. In quiet Vietnamese, just to Larry beside her, she says, "{I don't want to send him away again -- we don't know these people -- they don't know Roscoe --}" (this is with a firm conviction that she does, that Roscoe is a puzzle only she's figured out, that she knows all his tricks and tells and traps) "{-- what if he gets in trouble again?}" Larry is somewhat more on-task, distracted only in pangs of << {Roscoe used to like chess club} >> or << {Roscoe used to do AV} >> or << {Roscoe should be in precalculus by now} >> that come with a habitual sense of grief. He's been taking notes in meticulous, cramped cursive on a legal pad about teacher-student ratios and college credits and counseling, trying valiantly to hold up the Vos' end of this conversation in tentative, unconfident English. "I don't know about sending him so far away," he says dutifully, to My's prompting. "Roscoe has a lot of trouble in school, sometimes he --" this trails into a crabby << {God, you explain it, then,} >> at My's expression, but he takes the note. "He's been through a lot, you know? We have to be careful with him, we have to make sure he can't get in trouble again. Sometimes he just doesn't make smart choices. He's a good boy, he just -- you know, the kind of people he was surround by in that place -- the kind of friends he made there -- he doesn't know what's good for him. I don't know he's ready to be on his own yet. Maybe --" Roscoe has been told many times not to run in the laundromat, but the door-jingle-thumpthumpthump of him doing just that is a familiar enough sound that Larry clams up just in time for Roscoe to let himself into the office, slightly out of breath from either exertion or the anxiety attack he's working himself up to, a squeaking hamster-wheel spin of << oh no no no they got to him first they're gonna embarrass me they're gonna tell him I'm a bad kid and I'm gonna get thrown out before I even get in >> that only fizzes out when he has to catch his breath. The first stray thought that resolves itself from this static is, << (...dude, do you not think you're a bad kid?) >> and, somehow, the temptation to roll his eyes with embarrassment is what levels him out again. Mostly. There is still a slight squeak in his voice. "Lol," he says reflexively. "Hi, I'm -- you must be Mr. Xavier." This just sets him off again, << Doctor Xavier? is he a doctor? -- well, he should just use "mister" like a normal person anyway, he's not special for going to college for ten years -- MD or PhD? >> and the twinge of wow, weird when he considers that this isn't a distinction that matters anymore distracts him entirely from the fact that he didn't actually introduce himself. Charles Xavier (PhD) has been listening intently to Larry, nodding sympathetically at all the right times, sipping occasionally at his very, very faintly orange-flavored fizzy water. However uncertain his host's command of English may be, he seems to understand just fine. In fact, his own English, erudite and touched with Received Pronunciation, is remarkably easy to follow without any sense he's simplifying it for the benefit of the Vos. He straightens a little when the teenager enters, attentive but mild. "Yes, and you must be Roscoe," he replies with a small, absurdly dignified incline of his head. "Based on what I've heard, you're a bright young man who's been struggling, and might benefit from what my school has to offer." He tips his hand at the brochure My is leafing through, but to Roscoe his words seem somehow more intuitively directed at what he's heard about the school from Joshua, silent and stoic beside the venerable headmaster. To My and Larry now, Charles sounds profoundly earnest and wise, "The train ride isn't so very long these days, and he will have a fresh start with the support of our faculty, staff, and community on the other side of it. I do not exaggerate when I say we would go to the ends of the Earth for our students, and I assure you -- Roscoe will not be on his own, with us." Joshua has taken a LaCroix << {why the fuck is his English and mine French, are tangerines fancier than grapefruit somehow} >> but not opened it, largely because he suspects the popped-open tab will be painfully irresistible to Annoyingly Fidget with if he does. He has, ever since, been engaged in some abstracted contemplation of whether taking it but not drinking it is less polite than refusing it, but his attention snaps back to the present when he feels Roscoe's approach -- the sound not so much a familiar tell as the shape of his genetic signature. He's at least consciously registered the tail end of Larry's words, and though his expression doesn't shift at the kind of friends he made there he's amused and irritated in equal measure. << {exaggerate, you're underselling it, next time these kids get kidnapped into an alternate dimension we might go way the fuck beyond that} >> still doesn't crack his solemn expression, but his chin does lift, slightly, to Roscoe, before the shameless lie he offers instead of greeting: "Parking wasn't so bad."