Paul & Felix, Wednesday afternoon

[om_ghost]

Felix decides to bravely approach a stranger in the library, and Paul listens to him chatter very kindly.

Paul and computers were never going to be the greatest of friends, but since his handwriting wasn't exactly legible, he was fighting one of the computers in the library to try to plan out his history essay. Checking against his notes, he typed in the title, the class code and his name, then looked back at the books piled next to him.

Being able to fly didn't help his reading or comprehension abilities at all, even if not needing sleep did mean he had more hours to work.

Suppressing a sigh, he flipped open the first book, finger tracing down the chapter titles in search of the one on the reading list.


The library was one of the places Felix felt the safest, and the strongest. There, he was surrounded by knowledge, facts, understanding, everything about which he was most sure. Nothing there could hurt him, and he was armed with anything and everything he could need to keep himself safe.

Also, that's where the public computers were, so Felix ended up spending a lot of time there.

He found one of them already occupied by another boy he didn't know very well, who was looking a touch frustrated. Normally, Felix might be shy, especially since the other student looked decidedly larger, stronger, and more hardy than Felix's slender self. But this was the library, and his element. Aside from dreams, there was nothing he was more confident about than books and school. He chose one of the terminals next to the blond boy's. "Is that machine being unfriendly?" Felix asked, taking care that his voice was quiet but audible, and didn't squeak.


"No more than the books," Paul admitted ruefully, taking the excuse to look up with a small, wry smile. "But the last place I was at school had, uh, older computers, I guess? I don't really know my way round these things."


"Oh," said Felix, brightly but still not loudly, "these are the only ones I've used, so I have some experience. Mostly, I've just worked it out by trying different things until something works. You needn't worry about breaking them," he added, settling down and setting his books to the side. "Just save often."


"I'm more worried about losing anything I've managed to write." Although breaking the computers was definitely a possibility. "Saving stuff to the server doesn't actually submit it, right?"


Felix still had to fight the urge to turn shy when people (especially nice-looking boys) asked him questions directly. Shinobi wouldn't, Caius wouldn't, Eames wouldn't -- and Felix took his role models' behaviors very deeply to heart, imitating them as often as he could until those reactions became his. "That's right," he encouraged, making sure that he smiled and kept his attention on Paul, not allowing himself to duck away. "You have to take the extra step of sending it to the teacher when it's finished. You can save as much as you want to keep working.

"What is your assignment about?" he asked, since school subjects were more familiar than school equipment.


"Something about the civil war?" He pulled a face, leaning back away from the computer. "Or, you know, one of those where you get about three choices and none of them seem to make any sense."


Folding his boldly-decorated hands atop the small pile of notebooks and books he'd brought with him, Felix tilted his head inquisitively. "It can seem arbitrary, but I don't think they really are. Teachers want to know that you understand the topics in class, but essays are about how you think. Memorizing dates and facts doesn't help you understand what really happened."


Distracted by the boy's hands for a moment, Paul dragged his eyes back to his face instead, pulling a rueful face. "I think I don't understand. I'm Paul, by the way."


"Felix." He never offered to shake hands, but the slight head-tip and the sweet smile he gave Paul were greetings of approval. His fingers wiggled to draw attention, but Felix did not unfold his hands. "It's part of my mutation. A fairly specific and useless part. Like Kurt being blue. There's no reason why, it's just that way. How genes know what leaves are and how to draw them, I haven't the faintest idea."


"I guess the same way that the plants know how to grow them?" he offered. "I don't know how mine know how to turn sunlight into energy, but they do."


Felix brightened up at this suggestion, his strange mis-matched eyes lighting as he latched on to the idea. "Is that what you do? That's a bit like plants, too, isn't it? Perhaps our cells have some bits that are like plants in them, and those bits just remember how to do things that the human parts don't." It didn't explain his dream-walking or astral vision, but it was still terribly interesting.


"That's what I do," Paul agreed. "Well, that and flying, which I guess isn't very plant-like." He paused, considering. "Plants don't fly, right? I'm not great on botany, either."


"Not the entire plant." Felix considered for a moment, then went on, "But that's how they spread their seeds sometimes, you know. Like cottonwood trees and dandelions. Parts of them go for a float now and then." It pleased him greatly that Paul was a creative thinker. So often he ended up talking to people who wouldn't, or couldn't, think about things the way that Felix did.


Paul laughed. "I guess they do. I definitely do more purposeful than floating, though." And he was not about to think about spreading his seeds.


Luckily for them both, Felix tended not to think about that sort of thing in that sort of way. He leaned his chin in one hand and looked at Paul with a small sigh for effect, focusing on him as if there were nothing else of interest in the entire library. "I'm a little envious of you who can fly. It seems so graceful and effortless. And so wholly impossible at the same time."


"Effortless is a good word," he admitted. "It happens a lot when I'm not thinking about it."

Graceful, not so much. At least, not yet. He was getting better. Sparring sessions with Midnighter were helping a lot.


"You have a beautiful power, it sounds," Felix observed dreamily. "You drink in the sun and float in the sky. Like a... I don't know. Some kind of fae creature. I'm better at Greek mythology than Celtic."


"I guess that's one way to look at it." Not one that Paul had ever considered, and one he was slightly startled to hear. "I don't, uh, Icarus? Wasn't Icarus a sun guy?"


Felix laughed, quick and breathless, but not exactly at Paul. "Not the sort you want to be. He had wings made of wax and feathers, and flew too close to the sun, so they melted. The actual sun god was... actually, I get Helios and Apollo confused. It was one of the two." He brightened, quickly, and nodded to the computer terminal. "We could look it up, of course."


Paul echoed the laugh, pushing his chair back to give Felix clear access to the computer. "Go right ahead. I've a feeling you're gonna be quicker finding it than I would be."


Felix had gotten quite good at the basics of the Internet, despite that he hadn't been brought up with it as most of the other students had. With a smile, he scooted closer to the keyboard and did some quick typing, clicking, and peering at the screen. Within a few seconds he grinned brightly. "Here it is. Helios was a Titan, so he was rather like the actual Sun, where Apollo was an Olympian, so he was the god of light. It looks like the Greeks got them a bit confused, too."


"And those are both Greek gods, right?" Not Roman or Celtic or... religion was confusing.


"Mm-hm, those are the Greek names," Felix confirmed, encouragingly. "When the Romans traipsed in and conquered everybody, they had different names for everything, but really barely anybody uses those. Except in science, oddly enough."


Comfortable, now, that Paul wasn't going to intimidate or ignore him, Felix developed a rather talkative streak. "I think Apollo suits you better, but I'm a bit biased. I quite like him, because he was the god of learning things, too, plus he liked men and women equally, and loved a lot of very pretty young fellows. One finds role models where one can," he added with a little smile.


"Plus it sounds kinda like my name," he added, smiling back, relaxing more. Liking men and women equally was... okay, that was not a comment he'd expected, and wasn't sure where it came from, but he wasn't about to chase it up and make Felix uncomfortable. "So are you saying Apollo's one of your role models?"


"If I were going to pick one out of the Olympian line-up, it would probably be Apollo," Felix confirmed, "but I have plenty more. Just that Apollo seems quite powerful and beautiful and very, very interested in books, so... yes, I suppose he is."


"Beautiful's important?" Books, well. Yeah. Paul wasn't a great reader, or a great student, and books were his friends only a little more than computers were.


"Book-lovers aren't typically very beautiful in stories." Felix's explanation was accompanied by a near-constant flutter of his hands in illustration. "I like to find the ones that are. I don't see any reason why I can't be well-educated and entirely fashionable."


"I've never noticed," Paul admitted, fascinated by the movement of Felix's hands. "Fashionable's the same as beautiful for you, yeah?"


Felix gave that a few moments' due thought, though his quiet didn't silence his fingers tapping against themselves. "I think... that beauty doesn't have to be something you're born with. We can't help how our bodies look." His glance slid to his own hands, and the leafy-vine patterns in bold colors that he hadn't asked for any more than he'd asked for his hair or one pale-blue eye. "But there's no reason we can't make ourselves beautiful if we want to, by the way we present ourselves. Right?"


"It's not something I ever thought about," Paul said again. "It's, uh. It's not really been a priority in my life." As long as clothes were clean and without holes or tears in winter, and warm enough, he'd just been glad he had them. Haircuts were more about keeping his hair short enough not to get in the way.


Perhaps it took Felix a little while to pick up on the hint, but at last, he caught the idea that maybe he was chatting on about something that Paul wasn't interested in. Well. That wasn't a very good way to make a first impression. In hopes of earning back forgiveness, Felix turned his full attention to the other young man, and surfaced one of his sunniest smiles. "We all have things that mean the most to us. I can get a bit fixated on things."


"Books, fashion, and Greek gods?" he guessed with a smile. "Honestly, I don't know much about any of them."

"Among other things," Felix agreed, though Paul didn't need to hear about his obsessions with David Bowie or labyrinths. "You're sweet to listen to me go on and on. Did you... want some help with your assignment?"