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om_mainFox and Felix go for pizza after completing their ghostly mission, like you do. They review the 'case', Felix feels better about his powers, and Fox gets a bit teased about Dana. But just a bit.
Felix settled across from Fox in the dim and deep booth at the pizza place, scooting closer toward the inside. The waitress had already taken their order and gone, leaving them with drinks and a pile of breadsticks, so Felix at last removed the vintage-style sunglasses that he used to conceal the colors of his eyes. Aside from pinching a breadstick to nibble on, he kept his hands below the level of the table. Going out to eat in town was nerve-wracking enough; he didn't need any of his very recognizable characteristics out on full display. He didn't need to be remembered by anyone. Just in case.
"I suppose we did our good deed for the day," Felix said, since at some point, he was sure Fox would want to go over their adventure. It was about the first time he'd been able to speak since they'd found the house the ghost had guided them to. Felix might be up-front regarding his fear of ghosts, but he hadn't mentioned that he froze up around adult men -- even elderly, kind ones like Anthony had been.
Blowing idle bubbles through his soda straw and half-lost in thought, it took Fox a moment to register what Felix had said. That he'd said anything at all after the nearly uninterrupted quiet that had followed their delivery of the scarf. While he didn't know the precise reason for the redhead's silence, he knew that neither of them had felt particularly talkative after meeting the widower and that it had been the first time since his initial contact with the garment that the emotional weight of the situation had been real to him. The man had been near tears when they'd left, still devastated by his loss but so relieved to have the memento of the person he loved returned to him. It left the young man feeling emotionally drained and, for once, without much to say.
He glanced up, straightening as a he managed a lopsided grin, "For the day? That's setting the bar sort of high..." He pushed at the glass with his fingertips, making a wet line on the table, then leaned back into the booth. "But you're right. It was...good. You did good."
"For the... month?" Felix suggested as a correction. He had the same tentative expression as when he'd been overcome with a bashful blush at the cemetery, earlier, though it wasn't quite bright enough to see if he'd gone all pink again. Sometimes it was to his advantage that he blushed under praise. Sometimes it just felt decidedly un-masculine.
"I wouldn't have done anything about it if you hadn't seen anything the first time," he was quick to amend. "Or even the second time. I really liked that scarf. I probably would have kept it."
Fox shrugged, quick to dismiss the significance of the role he'd played. After all, he hadn't gotten involved to do a good deed or do the right thing...a fact which hadn't troubled him until he'd been faced with the reality of the man's pain. The end result was the same, but somehow it didn't feel right taking any pats on the back for just playing detective. "When I know I can find the answer," he said simply, "I can't ignore the question. It's not how I'm wired, you know?"
At first, Felix was ready to say that he didn't know, that he wasn't the same way, that he wasn't so determined. Except, in between tiny bird-bites of his breadstick, he realized that wasn't quite true. Puzzles put before him in class, difficult essay questions -- he could focus on finding those answers to the exclusion of everything else. Not only that, more than a year previous Felix had decided to make himself over, inside and out, and so far that was going swimmingly.
"I think I do," he allowed slowly, after he'd set his breadstick down. "I suppose I never really thought about ... all of this ... being useful."
Shocked out of his moment of self-analysis, Fox gawked openly at Felix. "Seriously? Any power can be useful, but powers like ours, the kind that let you learn things nobody else can...that's powerful stuff. Especially with so many questions that need to be answered. If I were you or Dana, I'd never stop bothering ghosts." The way he never stopped collecting tidbits of information from stray objects or shaking hands with strangers after 'forgetting' to put his gloves back on. "But then...I'm a nosy S.O.B."
"One thing genetics forgot to give us are ghost detectors," noted Felix. He didn't know Dana very well, but other people had told him about her abilities. "I can't seek them out like a radar. Even when I happen to find them, most of them can't even speak. For a long time, they were just... terrifying things that no one could see but me." His glance off to the side was partly to check that no one was listening, and partly just to try and deflect Fox's stare. "It's a bit of a chore to think of them as anything else."
Fox considered that. Dana had explained those same limitations to him before and it seemed just as unfortunate to him now as it had then. But then, if their powers had come without instructions, his had come without an off switch; none of it was perfect. He nodded, conceding, "Yeah. That makes sense. I guess we lucked out today, then. Finding one that was able and willing to talk like that."
Felix never before would have considered himself lucky to meet any ghost at all. "I didn't think you put much stock in luck or co-incidences," he observed with a small warming of his expression. Getting to know Fox had made Felix feel a little more normal. His usual friends -- Caius the Imaginative Pixie, Shinobi the Wildly Impractical, Eames the Eternal Falsifier and Philip the Fastidious Agent -- weren't exactly good examples of how teenagers interacted. Fox just made it easy to talk to him, though. "Aren't you always looking for the reasons why?"
Forced to acknowledge the potential inconsistency, Fox looked mildly sheepish as he shrugged his narrow shoulders, "Even I have to admit that things just happen sometimes. Occasionally. Otherwise, I'd be stuck believing in 'fate' and thinking like that makes me cringe." He made a face to illustrate how distasteful the idea was,then said, "Besides, what I'm after is truth. It's different."
After a contemplative bite of breadstick, Felix gave a slow nod. He could see the difference between 'reasons' and 'truth.' Still, he was a little more interested in the former. "The truth is that ghosts exist," Felix observed, still thoughtful. "But that doesn't tell you very much about them. I mean, I've seen ghosts since I was eight or nine, but I didn't know they could talk until a few months ago. I think I still prefer reasons."
The difference was a fine one, almost coming down to semantics, but it was still there. Theirs were two minds evaluating the same questions but looking for different answers. This, Fox decided, wasn't a bad thing; it was always better to have an excess of understanding than a deficiency. He nodded. "It seems like our goals are complimentary, in any case. We worked pretty well together," he observed, then grinned, "But don't tell Dana. She might be get jealous if she knows I have a second ghost-chasing ginger partner."
Yeah right.
Felix didn't look like he quite approved of the term ginger in reference to himself, but he did not bother to correct Fox, because the larger implication was more interesting. "You think of Dana as your partner? I realized the two of you are friends, of course, but... it's something more than that?"
What he meant was that Fox made it sound like a business relationship -- in two high-school students. What he didn't realize was that he'd insinuated something quite a bit less businesslike.
Phrased that way by someone other than himself, the term struck Fox as being suddenly...intimate. He picked up his glass, fiddling with the straw as he found his way toward an answer. "Well," he said, feigning matter-of-fact bluntness, "She reads all of the files in my database and discusses theories with me. Even if we almost never agree, I value her input and I know I can trust her to be honest. She's even gone out to investigate with me. So. Yeah. She's my partner." He concluded the rambling response only because he had to take a breath, then he slumped and pulled the straw to his lips.
Fox was really being very cute, even if he didn't realize it, and that made Felix smile (and forgive him for the 'ginger' comment). It was a very tiny smile, but sweet and pretty and quite pleased. "Are you going to make a file about today? This, um... case?" He paused. "Is that what you would call it, a case?"
If Fox had any inkling that the display had come across as 'cute', he likely would've sunk down far enough in the booth to be entirely hidden. As it was, though, he was relieved that the other boy was willing to change the subject for him and straightened a bit. This was easy to talk about. "Today?" He nodded. "Definitely. Any unexplained phenomena that comes up on my radar, especially one that I'm directly involved with, goes into the X-Files. It might be on the shorter side since I could never see the guy myself, but data is still data."
Then he added, smiling, "And yeah. I'd call this a 'case', wouldn't you?"
"I suppose so," said Felix, with all due gravitas. He had never imagined his strange visions as being interesting to anyone else, let alone worthy of study. It all seemed important to Fox, though -- he even had a system of some kind, it seemed. "If you need any more, um, data, I can try to tell you what I know. It's not very much, is all."
"Don't think I won't take you up on that," Fox warned, mostly joking. He knew more than anyone how his dogged interest and relentless questions could push people's buttons. He'd lost friends and made enemies asking questions and it was part of the reason his relationship with his parents was so tumultuous. But Felix, he thought, would probably tolerate it better than most. And he had offered.
That was exactly why Felix had offered, so that Fox would take him up on it. The idea that his power could be used for something useful was a novel one, and Felix wasn't quite ready to surrender it just yet. Besides, he asked a lot of questions, too. Just maybe for different reasons than Fox did. "I'm going to be a lot more careful, letting you help me accessorize, you know. I have a new hat that I'd really like not to have to return," he noted, though his small smile hadn't faded.
Fox held up his hands and shook his head, adamant but amused, "You've seen me, right? Even if I can tell you about the baggage your clothes might be carrying around, do you really want me to help you get dressed? You've got..." He lowered his hands, seeming to look for the right word. "...Style? I'd botch it. Completely."
That compliment turned Felix's little smile into a sunny beam of delight and approval, and he eve sat up a bit straighter. His personal style was one of the things about him that Felix had actually chosen, and shaped for himself, and it was a large part of his personal identity -- something he'd not always had. That smile changed his face completely, from merely delicate and elfin to actually quite pretty. "Well. If you ever need to dress up, you know where to turn."
Even if he hadn't particularly meant to, Fox could tell from the way Felix's face lit up that he'd said the right thing. He couldn't help smiling back. It wasn't often that the other boy looked so...happy. "I only dress up when I can't possibly get out of it," he said good-naturedly, "But I'll think of you the next time circumstances successful conspire against me."
What more could he ask for? "I would be delighted," Felix assured Fox. Even when the waitress arrived soon with their food, he only tamped down his satisfied smile down to below-blinding levels. Despite the difficulties of the day, he actually felt... really quite good about himself. That was a nice feeling.
Felix settled across from Fox in the dim and deep booth at the pizza place, scooting closer toward the inside. The waitress had already taken their order and gone, leaving them with drinks and a pile of breadsticks, so Felix at last removed the vintage-style sunglasses that he used to conceal the colors of his eyes. Aside from pinching a breadstick to nibble on, he kept his hands below the level of the table. Going out to eat in town was nerve-wracking enough; he didn't need any of his very recognizable characteristics out on full display. He didn't need to be remembered by anyone. Just in case.
"I suppose we did our good deed for the day," Felix said, since at some point, he was sure Fox would want to go over their adventure. It was about the first time he'd been able to speak since they'd found the house the ghost had guided them to. Felix might be up-front regarding his fear of ghosts, but he hadn't mentioned that he froze up around adult men -- even elderly, kind ones like Anthony had been.
Blowing idle bubbles through his soda straw and half-lost in thought, it took Fox a moment to register what Felix had said. That he'd said anything at all after the nearly uninterrupted quiet that had followed their delivery of the scarf. While he didn't know the precise reason for the redhead's silence, he knew that neither of them had felt particularly talkative after meeting the widower and that it had been the first time since his initial contact with the garment that the emotional weight of the situation had been real to him. The man had been near tears when they'd left, still devastated by his loss but so relieved to have the memento of the person he loved returned to him. It left the young man feeling emotionally drained and, for once, without much to say.
He glanced up, straightening as a he managed a lopsided grin, "For the day? That's setting the bar sort of high..." He pushed at the glass with his fingertips, making a wet line on the table, then leaned back into the booth. "But you're right. It was...good. You did good."
"For the... month?" Felix suggested as a correction. He had the same tentative expression as when he'd been overcome with a bashful blush at the cemetery, earlier, though it wasn't quite bright enough to see if he'd gone all pink again. Sometimes it was to his advantage that he blushed under praise. Sometimes it just felt decidedly un-masculine.
"I wouldn't have done anything about it if you hadn't seen anything the first time," he was quick to amend. "Or even the second time. I really liked that scarf. I probably would have kept it."
Fox shrugged, quick to dismiss the significance of the role he'd played. After all, he hadn't gotten involved to do a good deed or do the right thing...a fact which hadn't troubled him until he'd been faced with the reality of the man's pain. The end result was the same, but somehow it didn't feel right taking any pats on the back for just playing detective. "When I know I can find the answer," he said simply, "I can't ignore the question. It's not how I'm wired, you know?"
At first, Felix was ready to say that he didn't know, that he wasn't the same way, that he wasn't so determined. Except, in between tiny bird-bites of his breadstick, he realized that wasn't quite true. Puzzles put before him in class, difficult essay questions -- he could focus on finding those answers to the exclusion of everything else. Not only that, more than a year previous Felix had decided to make himself over, inside and out, and so far that was going swimmingly.
"I think I do," he allowed slowly, after he'd set his breadstick down. "I suppose I never really thought about ... all of this ... being useful."
Shocked out of his moment of self-analysis, Fox gawked openly at Felix. "Seriously? Any power can be useful, but powers like ours, the kind that let you learn things nobody else can...that's powerful stuff. Especially with so many questions that need to be answered. If I were you or Dana, I'd never stop bothering ghosts." The way he never stopped collecting tidbits of information from stray objects or shaking hands with strangers after 'forgetting' to put his gloves back on. "But then...I'm a nosy S.O.B."
"One thing genetics forgot to give us are ghost detectors," noted Felix. He didn't know Dana very well, but other people had told him about her abilities. "I can't seek them out like a radar. Even when I happen to find them, most of them can't even speak. For a long time, they were just... terrifying things that no one could see but me." His glance off to the side was partly to check that no one was listening, and partly just to try and deflect Fox's stare. "It's a bit of a chore to think of them as anything else."
Fox considered that. Dana had explained those same limitations to him before and it seemed just as unfortunate to him now as it had then. But then, if their powers had come without instructions, his had come without an off switch; none of it was perfect. He nodded, conceding, "Yeah. That makes sense. I guess we lucked out today, then. Finding one that was able and willing to talk like that."
Felix never before would have considered himself lucky to meet any ghost at all. "I didn't think you put much stock in luck or co-incidences," he observed with a small warming of his expression. Getting to know Fox had made Felix feel a little more normal. His usual friends -- Caius the Imaginative Pixie, Shinobi the Wildly Impractical, Eames the Eternal Falsifier and Philip the Fastidious Agent -- weren't exactly good examples of how teenagers interacted. Fox just made it easy to talk to him, though. "Aren't you always looking for the reasons why?"
Forced to acknowledge the potential inconsistency, Fox looked mildly sheepish as he shrugged his narrow shoulders, "Even I have to admit that things just happen sometimes. Occasionally. Otherwise, I'd be stuck believing in 'fate' and thinking like that makes me cringe." He made a face to illustrate how distasteful the idea was,then said, "Besides, what I'm after is truth. It's different."
After a contemplative bite of breadstick, Felix gave a slow nod. He could see the difference between 'reasons' and 'truth.' Still, he was a little more interested in the former. "The truth is that ghosts exist," Felix observed, still thoughtful. "But that doesn't tell you very much about them. I mean, I've seen ghosts since I was eight or nine, but I didn't know they could talk until a few months ago. I think I still prefer reasons."
The difference was a fine one, almost coming down to semantics, but it was still there. Theirs were two minds evaluating the same questions but looking for different answers. This, Fox decided, wasn't a bad thing; it was always better to have an excess of understanding than a deficiency. He nodded. "It seems like our goals are complimentary, in any case. We worked pretty well together," he observed, then grinned, "But don't tell Dana. She might be get jealous if she knows I have a second ghost-chasing ginger partner."
Yeah right.
Felix didn't look like he quite approved of the term ginger in reference to himself, but he did not bother to correct Fox, because the larger implication was more interesting. "You think of Dana as your partner? I realized the two of you are friends, of course, but... it's something more than that?"
What he meant was that Fox made it sound like a business relationship -- in two high-school students. What he didn't realize was that he'd insinuated something quite a bit less businesslike.
Phrased that way by someone other than himself, the term struck Fox as being suddenly...intimate. He picked up his glass, fiddling with the straw as he found his way toward an answer. "Well," he said, feigning matter-of-fact bluntness, "She reads all of the files in my database and discusses theories with me. Even if we almost never agree, I value her input and I know I can trust her to be honest. She's even gone out to investigate with me. So. Yeah. She's my partner." He concluded the rambling response only because he had to take a breath, then he slumped and pulled the straw to his lips.
Fox was really being very cute, even if he didn't realize it, and that made Felix smile (and forgive him for the 'ginger' comment). It was a very tiny smile, but sweet and pretty and quite pleased. "Are you going to make a file about today? This, um... case?" He paused. "Is that what you would call it, a case?"
If Fox had any inkling that the display had come across as 'cute', he likely would've sunk down far enough in the booth to be entirely hidden. As it was, though, he was relieved that the other boy was willing to change the subject for him and straightened a bit. This was easy to talk about. "Today?" He nodded. "Definitely. Any unexplained phenomena that comes up on my radar, especially one that I'm directly involved with, goes into the X-Files. It might be on the shorter side since I could never see the guy myself, but data is still data."
Then he added, smiling, "And yeah. I'd call this a 'case', wouldn't you?"
"I suppose so," said Felix, with all due gravitas. He had never imagined his strange visions as being interesting to anyone else, let alone worthy of study. It all seemed important to Fox, though -- he even had a system of some kind, it seemed. "If you need any more, um, data, I can try to tell you what I know. It's not very much, is all."
"Don't think I won't take you up on that," Fox warned, mostly joking. He knew more than anyone how his dogged interest and relentless questions could push people's buttons. He'd lost friends and made enemies asking questions and it was part of the reason his relationship with his parents was so tumultuous. But Felix, he thought, would probably tolerate it better than most. And he had offered.
That was exactly why Felix had offered, so that Fox would take him up on it. The idea that his power could be used for something useful was a novel one, and Felix wasn't quite ready to surrender it just yet. Besides, he asked a lot of questions, too. Just maybe for different reasons than Fox did. "I'm going to be a lot more careful, letting you help me accessorize, you know. I have a new hat that I'd really like not to have to return," he noted, though his small smile hadn't faded.
Fox held up his hands and shook his head, adamant but amused, "You've seen me, right? Even if I can tell you about the baggage your clothes might be carrying around, do you really want me to help you get dressed? You've got..." He lowered his hands, seeming to look for the right word. "...Style? I'd botch it. Completely."
That compliment turned Felix's little smile into a sunny beam of delight and approval, and he eve sat up a bit straighter. His personal style was one of the things about him that Felix had actually chosen, and shaped for himself, and it was a large part of his personal identity -- something he'd not always had. That smile changed his face completely, from merely delicate and elfin to actually quite pretty. "Well. If you ever need to dress up, you know where to turn."
Even if he hadn't particularly meant to, Fox could tell from the way Felix's face lit up that he'd said the right thing. He couldn't help smiling back. It wasn't often that the other boy looked so...happy. "I only dress up when I can't possibly get out of it," he said good-naturedly, "But I'll think of you the next time circumstances successful conspire against me."
What more could he ask for? "I would be delighted," Felix assured Fox. Even when the waitress arrived soon with their food, he only tamped down his satisfied smile down to below-blinding levels. Despite the difficulties of the day, he actually felt... really quite good about himself. That was a nice feeling.
