fandomtownies | Magic Box, Friday, 9/09

For all your decaffeinated magic needs!

She's around.

Things being Very Bad Ideas didn't always stop Kennedy from going through with them; she'd just gotten out of her portal sometime in the late morning when she sent a text message to Tara. (The coffee she'd been carrying when she stepped into the portal had disappeared, which, okay, annoying but at least it freed her hand up to grab her phone.)

Hey! Just hit the island. Going to go check in and drop my stuff off at the hotel but want to hang later or something?

Tara blinked at her phone, then, carefully, tapped something back:

You won't believe this but I swapped my work day. Am @ the shop. Lunch? I'll order delivery.

Just to keep this from being exactly the same.

Seriously? Weird. Cool but weird, Kennedy sent back. Yay, habitual less-than-well-considered word choice. Well, it would be weird, in that familiar but sort of off way. Which was totally handle-able, right?

A moment later:

Works for me. Be there in about 30.

Totally handle-able, right.

Okay.

Tara ordered a large pizza -- half veggie, half pepperoni -- and tried to order some soda, but had to settle for lemonade. With luck, it would get there just about as Kennedy did.

And then she just had to wait.

It was totally handle-able! You know, for the girl who hadn't done this in over a year and a half. Kennedy took a little longer than half an hour to show up, for reasons that had to do with the slightly sulky expression on her face. "I tried to pick up coffee on the way, and no luck. Who ordered the embargo? Because so not cool."

Yes, Kennedy, that's a great greeting.

"...also, hi. God, been a while."

"I talked to you a week and a half ago," Tara said, mildly bemused. She had to try to see the funny side of it. "How long has it been for you? and I have no clue, on the embargo. Island's been in a weird mood this week."

"Your week and a half is my about-a-month, but I meant since I've been in here," Kennedy clarified, resolutely ignoring how this felt weirder than she'd thought it would in favor of giving her a half-smile. "Kinda want to say it looks different from how I remember, but..."

When had she ever paid that much attention to the store's actual layout before?

"... I can't even remember when that was," Tara admitted. "It ... didn't seem important. We were both supposed to have the summer, not --"

She sighed, tucked her hair back.

"We're here now," she said, and there was that awkward, hitting her where she didn't expect it. "And, and we should get pizza really soon. So. Hi."

"Yeah." That summer they'd been supposed to have felt like forever ago; it threw Kennedy a little off-kilter, and she hooked her thumbs into her pockets and stood nearby, somewhat awkwardly and not at all with the kind of cheerful personal-space-invading she might have gone for once. That, too, felt... not wrong exactly. Just different in a way that almost made her feel like her surroundings should be slightly washed-out like an old photograph.

"Thanks," Kennedy ventured when her own lapse into uncomfortable silence got to be too much for her. "For lunch."

Tara shrugged, uneasy. "You bought lunch for me often enough."

The awkward pause that followed lasted just long enough for the pizza guy's arrival to feel like salvation. Tara took a moment longer than was absolutely necessary to pay for the order, fuss with the box, and bring it to the table where they normally ate.

Except there was no "normally" about it, anymore.

"Guess that means we're even, huh?" Kennedy tried to joke, trailing a couple of paces behind her. It felt like the joke fell a little flat-- it wasn't as if she hadn't gotten thanked for all those lunches, it was just that the, um, form of expression was probably against the breakup rulebook they still hadn't read.

The table was helpful in its own way; she could keep it between herself and Tara, which seemed so dumb that it shouldn't have been as reassuring as it turned out to be.

"So..." God. Small talk. This shouldn't be hard. "Anything interesting in the last week and a half?"

Yeah, having to ask put a big neon-highlighter circle around the lack-of-normal.

Small talk. Right.

"People are being all insane about the student council race," Tara offered, after a moment's thought. "Um ... there were child safety locks on everything last week. And radio says all the alcohol on the island is gone."

So, nothing much.

"What about your month and a half?"

Kennedy had never had much patience for school politics, so she smiled briefly in a eh, typical, what are you going to do about it way in regard to the StuCo race. "Good old Fandom, huh? All with the... unexplained weird. So much for having a wild room party all weekend, I guess."

She reached for a slice of pizza, grateful to have something to do with her hands. "Well... I'm kinda having way too much fun working with the kids in the self-defense class at the youth center, and I started looking into classes like I promised? I might have a couple of options already."

She'd also had a pretty fun date a few days ago, but maybe she shouldn't bring that up.

"Oh, you're working with kids?" Tara's heart melted a little. "That's awesome. Is Jane taking classes with you?"

She started picking the pepperoni off her slice and eating it first, mostly for the something-to-do-with-her-hands reason.

Oh, good. Bring something aww-inducing up, why don't you, Kennedy.

She'd grabbed a veggie slice, and was doing the same thing with the olives on hers as she shrugged. "Nah. This is on weekdays, and she doesn't usually come out to see me except on weekends. I try to teach her a few things when I can, but I got yelled at big time when she broke this super-hideous statue in the study, trying to practice in secret, so... that's not so much a thing."

She popped another slice of olive into her mouth, chewing on her fingernail for a moment afterward. "I know, I know. Me working with kids. You can laugh; it's totally okay."

(Kennedy was actually pretty good with them, as the twins had evidenced. It was just when they got past about 14 that her patience wore really thin, really fast.)

"Hon-"

Ooops. Not what Tara meant to call her.

"Honestly," she tried again, "what are you talking about? You were really good with our kids. And with your kids the year before, from what I saw."

She chewed her pepperoni, swallowed it. "I can laugh if that'll make you feel better?"

If Kennedy were more of a klutzy person she'd have dropped her pizza right there, because ouch, dammit. She was supposed to be over this by now, but the near-slip, and the actual reminder of the kids, made her miss Tara again... as much as you could miss someone who was standing right there.

Which turned out to be a lot more than you'd think.

"You don't have to. It's just an option," she replied quietly, staring down at the pizza instead of looking at Tara; talking on the phone was easier these days. God, maybe she should have acknowledged this was a bad idea. "But, you know, I thought maybe you could use the laugh."

"I ..." There was really nothing to say; Tara felt like Kennedy wanted something she didn't have to give anymore, and she'd never get it right, no matter how she tried. She needed to laugh, sure, but she'd missed the joke and there was no recapturing the moment.

She went for a subject change instead. "So, uh, dance tonight, right?" she said. "Are there going to be secret graduate shenanigans?"

The truth was, Kennedy felt awful about how palpably uncomfortable this had become, and the only ways she could think of to cheer Tara up were out of the question, which was why she forced a laugh.

"Oh, yeah. Totally. Kinda top secret though, at least until radio spills everything."

"So there isn't some secret adult tactic to keep the squirrels away," Tara said, trying to inject levity into her voice. "Damn. Here I thought I had it made in a couple months."

"Sorry, no," Kennedy replied, keeping her tone light in a stubbornly determined effort to ease things in a more comfortable direction. "I mean, unless the memo got lost in the mail, nobody let me know about anything like that... hey, yeah, it's almost your birthday here, huh? God, I almost forgot; you've been nineteen in my world for a few weeks now."

Not so much, Kennedy, no.

Cautiously she added, "I was sort of thinking of maybe coming out here again for that..."

She'd leave that up to Tara, though, since this was already kind of on the ow side.

"It's a month away." Tara took a fresh piece of pizza as she mulled the offer. It wasn't that she didn't still love Kennedy. It was that seeing her back on the island, especially now that her grief was a little less raw, was hard in a way Tara hadn't expected.

Maybe someday they could hang out in the same old place and talk as friends again, but Tara wasn't there yet.

"I'm glad you want to do that, but -- Kennedy, I don't think that's a good idea."

She looked like she hated having said that.

Edited 2011-09-10 00:58 (UTC)

Kennedy agreed with that assessment, really she did-- she couldn't help looking a tiny bit disappointed, though.

"Yeah," she conceded, her jaw a little tight as she nodded. She was in that weird place where she'd accepted that their relationship was over, and was okay with that, but she didn't have a clue how to handle still loving Tara despite that. (Not that she was willing to give that up, pretty much ever.) "Guess we're on the same wavelength there. This is a little, um..."

'Little' was really not the word for it.

"But we'll get past this," she went on determinedly. "No big, we'll figure it out. And then someday... we can just do lunch and everything'll be cool, yeah?"

"Someday, sure." Tara wasn't certain she believed that, but that was more about Tara than about their relationship.

"I mean, I like talking to you. I do. It just ... seems like things keep getting weirder." She blew out a breath. "I don't want us to end up yelling at each other."

"Really, really, really not," Kennedy agreed. "Giant detour signs around that whole possibility. We never did yelling, so let's keep it that way."

Even if that meant sticking strictly to email and the occasional phone call for a while; Kennedy could just suck it up and deal if it kept Tara from being miserable. (She could, right?)

And now she did try to meet Tara's gaze, just for a moment, wanting to convey somehow that she wasn't mad. "You're kinda one of the best friends I've ever had. I want that to stay on the record."

"You are the best friend I've ever had." Tara's voice was soft, firm. "And that goes on your record, too. Even if we're not doing s-so great with friendship right now."

"We're doing fine there," Kennedy assured her, struck by the sudden urge to tear up a bit. "Just working out the details. 'Cause yeah, you're at the top of my list too."

On impulse, even if she felt a little silly about it, she wiped her hand off on her jeans and stuck it out, pinky extended. "Try to keep it that way?"

Tara smiled, a little wobbly but genuine. "Promise," she said, as she snagged Kennedy's pinky.

Kennedy curled her pinky finger around Tara's and shook lightly.

"Me too. So we're good, then."

Or they would be, eventually. She hoped.

Tea in the morning, tea in the evening, tea at supper time,
You get tea when it's raining, tea when it's snowing,
Tea when the weather's fine.
You get tea as a mid-day stimulant
You get tea with your afternoon tea
For any old ailment or disease
For Christ sake have a cuppa tea.

Magic Box, Friday, 9/09

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