WORLD LEARNED

By all considerations, he imagines this isn’t a very traditional sort of first date.  Spending the day inside, rain pittering beyond the window -- it’s an early spring shower, the kind that turns the sky grey-but-blue and invites sunlight to break intermittently.  They spent most of the day talking over tea -- Triana isn’t home.  Elected to give them the whole day to themselves.  At some point Pete had mentioned a beloved movie, one Orpheus was familiar with ( which he didn’t say, delighted to let Pete rave about detail after beloved detail. ), as it had been a favorite of Triana’s for a few years and everything from the aesthetic to the music, to the story, had struck fondly at his heart.  

He’s careful about how he tells Pete of his familiarity -- implying awareness but not implying he’s seen it -- so that Pete can be appropriately ecstatic to be sharing a thing so dear with him when they put it on.  He knows he’s succeeded when Pete flashes him a winning smile and settles in on the sofa next to him. 

@eldritche

     PETE NEVER EXPECTED this to happen. To be sat on a necromancer’s couch, tea clutched in his hands, ready to recap the extremely homosexual date he’d been on no more than 24 hours before. Life really has a way about it, huh? A mere two months ago Pete would have recoiled at the idea of openly discussing gay shit, but now thanks to Orpheus–

“ Yeah, I mean- he was cute! Sorta campy, not really my type. But.. cute, yanno? ” White shrugged into his tea, gaze wandering around the various books and decor lining the walls (eye contact? No thank you. Not when he was talking about his type).  “ You were so right, though. He really was a good starter date. Totally put things into perspective, like- it really isn’t all that intimidating when you sit and realize we are all just as clueless when it comes to this sort of thing. ”

Orpheus had done the impossible. He’d achieved what scores of people throughout White’s life had set out to and yet could never quite nail down. Dr. Byron Orpheus, in all his wisdom, in all his patience, had finally gotten the world’s most stubborn (or was it lazy?) albino out of the closet and into the dating pool. It was just Pete’s luck that the only guy he had an eye for was the very man playing cupid puppetmaster.

He is equally excited and devastated, wanting to hear every detail and none of them all at once -- WHY ?  Why oh why had he gone and opened his big mouth about setting Pete up -- ?  Despite the mental debate he has with himself regularly on the topic, he knows WHY.  He wants Pete to be able to accept and love himself -- Orpheus own needs and desires come second to Pete.  Even if the idea of setting him up on date after date does tie Orpheus’s stomach in knots.  He’d find someone, eventually, wouldn’t he -- ?  Pete was lovely and intelligent, witty -- he was a keeper, for sure.  Someone would snatch him up, see what the world was missing out on eventually.  ( There is a voice, small and insecure, that reminds him he did this because he isn’t GOOD enough for Pete White.  Too afraid of the rejection that would surely come to even try. )

Yuletide Celebrations -- he cannot count or fathom in truth, the precise number of years spending winter alone, sequestered away with his books and scrolls -- lit by synthetic fireglow.  Only aware of a phantom kind of warmth -- there is an entirely real warmth present currently.  It’s different to observe the world than to be a part of it -- as he has been since Triana was born.  

The party is in full swing -- everyone present seems to know one another well.  The two talking away from the rest of the party draw his eye -- He thinks perhaps he’s seen them around, sort of distnatly familiar in the way small social circles usually are -- but he’s confident they’ve never met.   He’s lovely -- a specter of the winter beyond the windows, Orpheus thinks he could picture him wreathed in snow, a wraith of ice.  Cold is perhaps the most silent and elegant of deaths -- For someone so WINTRY and white, his smile is remarkably warm.  Radiant like the sun.  Enchanting.  Orpheus, amiable as he is, doesn’t hesitate to make an introduction --- in his traditional flare for the dramatic of course.  He smiles at the festive sprig of mistletoe his ghostly winter wears around his head and recites a poem from MEMORY. 

( his voice lulls low and dulcet, as though intimately familiar with every lilt and lull of the words, the way it was meant to be heard. ) 

“ Sitting under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle burning on, Shadows lurking everywhere: Some one came, and kissed me there. Tired I was; my head would go Nodding under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), No footsteps came, no voice, but only, Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely, Stooped in the still and shadowy air Lips unseen—and kissed me there. “