Work Text:
He can’t reach you when you look off into the distance, eyes glazed over and mouth dropped a little open. He tried, once, in the very beginning of your friendship. Attempted to make some witty—or he likes to think it’s witty—joke and laughed awkwardly. You hadn’t even turned to look at him at the right moment, instead blinked a few times owlishly and then slowly tilted your head to the side. The joke had gone unappreciated.
He wonders, not for the first time, about what it is you think when you’re like this. Distant, in a mind space he can’t even begin to fathom.
You came into Pelican Town like a whirlwind, all bright smiles and happy laughs. You cheered everyone up and revitalized that old farm, the one he used to hear Jas and Vincent tell ghost stories about. You breathed fresh life into dead ground, walked over rotten soil and had flowers sprout at your feet. You were spring personified. He wanted so badly to be near you, and then somehow, in some odd twist of fate, you had felt the same.
“Do you ever wonder,” you say, this time, for the first time ever since a foggy dreamlike expression had filtered over your expression. “Do you ever wonder,” you repeat, because you like to do that sometimes, repeat yourself, to really drive a point home, “that there are other worlds out there?”
Sebastian raised his fingers to pluck his cigarette out of his mouth, dropped it down so he could peer at you with all of the thoughtful, pursed lip expression this question deserved. “No,” he finally replies after a long stretch of silence. Too long. Your eyes are already back to their distant musing once more. “I like the one we’re in.”
That seems to catch your attention, at least. You turn those (e/c) eyes onto him in startled confusion. “You do?”
“Yeah,” he replied with a shrug, an awkward fumbling of shoulders, bones too sharp but still stuffed into his gangly shapes anyway. “Why wouldn’t I?”
You’re still peering at him. The just out of his reach feeling has gone away. You’re back now, a smile curling the corner of your lips, eyes becoming playful. You’re with him, not too far off anymore. “I always pictured you’d say something like,” you paused here and puffed your cheeks, seemed to try your best at an impression of him, “Pelican Town is the worst, I hate it here, I wish I could move to the city!”
Sometimes he feels like that. Not as often as of late though. Not whenever you’re around, here with a louder than life personality and a quick joke that springs from your lips at the perfect times. Sebastian had started to have to fend off questions from his mom about you, about what you two were. He wants to tell her—but not yet. Not just yet.
It’s nice, having something to keep all to himself, especially one as delightful as you.
“I don’t sound like that,” Sebastian chose to reply with instead. You threw your head back and cackled.
“That’s what you’re upset about?” you crowed.
“Well you got that right,” he sniffed pointedly, a trace of fake disgust in his voice, “but the rest? It’s bullshit.”
Your eyes sparkled as you stuck your tongue out at him. “I’m still figuring you out,” you responded, the humor shifting to something else, something sly and secretive.
“Ditto,” Sebastian said as he threw his cigarette on the ground. “Come on,” and he held a hand out for you to grasp as you both made your way through the snow of your first winter together. “There’s something I found online I wanted to show you.”
“Lead the way,” you say cheerfully as you both walked, “and I’ll always follow.”