playinginsand | (no subject)

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Tobias isn't brooding. He doesn't brood. He just... looks like he is.

He sits cross-legged on the ground in front of the small house they've been working to restore. It's a poor attempt at a meditative position, but it is an attempt. He tries to do that whole deep, calm breathing thing, but it doesn't come very easily. Which is ironic because he never really had trouble staying calm before. It used to be his default mode, and now he has to struggle to stay centered and...

He sighs.

This doesn't seem to be working.

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Rachel grins at him, bright and wide, even while she shrugs. "The movie theater looks like it hasn't worked in over twenty years, but I bet someone's re-opened the Cinnabon."

Like when they all used to meet in a big group, before it was too dangerous. And someone would buy the giant bun and put it in the middle and they'd all try to grab a bite before Ax would grab the whole thing, paper plate and fork and all, and try to shove it into his mouth.

"Cinnabon..." Tobias shakes his head. "Those were the days, huh?" When they were so much younger. And despite all they'd seen they'd been almost innocent.

They'd been surprisingly close to it. Rachel's grin dies down to a smile, no less pleased but more thoughtful. "Yeah," she agrees quietly.

When they all still had families and places to go to feel safe and a purpose they believed in.

"Yeah, they were."

"What happened to us?" he asks. Even though he knows the answer: they won. At any cost.

He gets a little laugh in return, which might seem out of place. But it's as bitter as it is amused, and Rachel looks up from picking at her meal to smirk at him.

"We didn't give up."

"Be careful what you wish for, huh?" Not that he regrets it. Not even losing Rachel, as much as that hurt and as bitter as it made him. It wasn't like they could have given up. It just wasn't an option.

The smirk fades away and Rachel gives him an even look. "You think so?"

How would things have turned out, for all of them, without the war?

"I don't know..." Tobias shrugs. Thinking about life without the war got dangerously close to thinking about whether or not he and Rachel would have really ever gotten to know each other if the secrets hadn't thrown them together.

Even Rachel's thoughts go in that direction. Most of her concerns about the war, and the hypothetical 'if it never happened' question have to do with her own future, her own well-being and purpose if no one had ever given her a weapon to fight with. But only because it's the only question she's still not sure how to answer.

"I knew your name long before we walked across the construction site, Tobias."

"I'm pretty sure you knew everyone's name ever," he smiles fondly. He'd always thought of Rachel as intensely social. Despite what the war had done to her.

She smirks at him. A less serious girl would stick her tongue out, but Rachel's smirk teases well enough all on its own. "Well, I noticed you," she says instead, grinning a little. "We didn't have a lot of classes together and you weren't exactly running up to introduce yourself. But I knew you before Jake started talking about you."

...and the swirly he'd found him in.

Tobias blushes. Which is annoying. Stupid human body and its stupid involuntary reactions.

"Well," he says (almost mumbles, really), "I noticed you too." Though how anyone could fail to notice Rachel was beyond him.

Rachel's used to being notice. It means she never had to put out much effort in order to meet people, though she did have to remember names and details to keep on good terms. And while there was, and always sort of had been, a decently sized wave of boys that had tried to occupy her attention through junior high and her few years of high school... she had noticed Tobias.

Sometimes, she found, it was the people that did their best to stay out of her way and unnoticed from everyone that were the most interesting.

See: Tobias versus, say, Marco.

"I don't know how things would have turned out without it," Rachel says quietly, poking at her food again, "but I don't see the point in wondering about it either. Life wasn't... it wasn't that bad. And the things we did, some people wait their whole lives to do."

And some people... don't.

"We were kids. We did our best and I think our best was pretty damn good."

Oh, yeah, Tobias will be thrilled to hear that he's being compared to Marco. Absolutely thrilled.

He shrugs. It's a detached sort of gesture when it could be a bitter one. "We never really got to be kids, though, did we?" Any time they'd pretended to be kids it had been just that: pretending so that no one would know what they really were.

Compared to and coming out intensely more favorably.

Rachel frowns without looking up. She can't see the shrug, but the bitterness is obvious enough in his voice, in his choice of words.

She shrugs back. "I don't know. Not everything was about missions."

Her eyes flicker up to his, smirk threatening at her lips. "And there's a used car salesman out there who's probably still pretty upset at us."

There was no way Tobias could hold back a tiny grin at that. "I imagine there is." She was right: it hadn't been all missions.

"I just wish we'd had more of those times." Things to make them laugh. Smile. Do stupid things that kids do when they're kids.

Rachel sighs. She shouldn't but-- well, no, maybe she should. They're both bad at sulking and wishing the past were different and it's been a tense few months. Maybe snapping a little is okay.

"Well, we didn't," she says sharply, looking up at him, eyes hard but not cruel. Firm.

Stop wishing.

"We made time to be kids during a war. There's nothing stopping us from acting like teenagers now."

Other than their own whining, wishing, hoping, reminiscing...

Tobias looks back at her just as seriously. "I don't think I even know how to be a teenager."

Which is too bad. It sort of sounds like fun.

Which just goes to show that Tobias is totally a teenager.

Rachel scowls at him. Sometimes it's like he makes things intentionally difficult.

(if only by asking Rachel to tell him how teenagers should act... how should she know?)

"Then what is so great that you're missing out on? What do you miss so much?"

Tobias shrugs. "I don't know, really. I guess I always thought..."

He doesn't know what he always thought. Only someone who'd never been a teenager thought that it would make sense and be easy and not awkward. If they'd been normal teenagers he and Rachel could have been a normal happy carefree couple without all the confusion and conflict.

Did we mention that Tobias has no idea what it means to be a teenager?

"Tobias, look around you sometime. Look at the people we know, that we've met here. None of them have had normal childhoods. I mean-- god, you should hear some of the stories Jo's told me! And she's probably the most normal!"

She shakes her head, jaw set irritably and leans back in her chair to cross her arms over her chest. It's a defensive posture, but she is defensive. Rachel has a loose idea of what it means to be a teenager and her own issues with what the war did to her and her relationship with-- everyone.

But this?

"We were fighting almost as soon as we actually became teenagers. What are you basing what we should be on? TV? Because that's not real."

"I don't know," Tobias mumbles. "I just... wanted things to be simpler."

But they only get more complicated. With him. With her. With them.

That shuts her up. Even if only for a moment.

Rachel stays leaning back, arms crossed, but she relaxes minutely. Long enough to look at him, really look. Because sitting across from her at the same table, having a conversation about life and each other and a trip they want to take, is a very real, very human, very teenage boy.

"You've been a hawk for three years," she says finally, quietly, and as gentle as Rachel is capable of being. She knows it's hard for him, she knows it hurts, and she doesn't even want to think about what it would do to her to lose her own morphing ability.

But she can reach over the table and take his hand.

"This is different... but it's simpler, too."

He flinches at her words, but when she touches his hand there's an almost electric shock that runs through him. He had been happy as a bird, really. It was who he was.

But... it was odd to think, but he'd missed simple things like human touch. Tobias allows his hand to turn and his fingers to wrap around hers.

"Simpler?" he repeats, more amused than anything. "At least I knew what to do before." Now... he's as lost as any teenage boy.

Rachel isn't amused. If anything, it makes her frown again, shift uncomfortably. But she still holds tight to his hand.

"You knew how to fly," she argues, "and hunt and attack. But what about..."

me?

Rachel might not know how to date any more than he does. But for the three years they were together, she couldn't escape the very human urge to touch and show affection. Not like he could.