white_oleander | Room 210; Thursday [04/18].

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Room 210; Thursday [04/18].

It was a little weird, really; it felt like Astrid still had all the time in the world, and then it was Thursday, with a portal date on Monday, and then that was it. She had no more classes; she had maybe one more shift at T&C if she wanted, but she probably wouldn't bother, and then the weekend, and that was it, and she'd spent some time yesterday white-washing the wall again (another layer, the room another fraction of an inch smaller), so that she could really focus and concentrate on filling it back up again with her very last painting.

She'd spent so much time trying to figure out what it should be, wanting it to be something rife with significance and importance. She considering going the route that Sabine usually did, a collage of various things that had happened over her year here, going through her strange journey from being convinced she was losing her mind to gracefully accepting things like being a lamb for a week or a Viking for a weekend, the people came from different worlds and different time periods, and very little of it made sense, and yet it all seemed to work. That her roommate was from space, she was in a self-made prison 'gang' that consisted of only one other person, and one of her best friends was a cat-faced girl who didn't see herself as a cat-faced girl. She'd had her first kiss here, she'd been a redhead, she'd been on homecoming court, she'd even been on the damn Student Council. She'd come a really long way from that quiet girl hunched over a sketchbook, hiding behind her hair and not wanting to talk to anyone. There would be no lack of things to paint in a collage like that.

But, ultimately, in the end, Astrid decided it really wasn't her style. Grabbing a ladder, so that she could start in the very top corner of the wall and work her way across and down, she had her palette of mostly greys and blacks and whites, with some dark, deep blues, pale hints of red, rich hunter greens. And she set to the task of painting out a wall full of oleanders, delicate little stars of five even, deadly petals in various sizes scattered from one end to the other, mostly in greyscale, playing with shadow and light, with little streaks of color here and there, on the way a particular petal turned, on the underside of a stem, little bursts to keep it from entirely fading into itself.

[[ door and post are open! ]]

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Astrid quirked a brow. "Unexpected how?"

Because it wasn't that the unexpected pudding part was exactly surprising; it wasn't, and she was no longer one to even think that it should be anymore. The question was more for the fact that there were so many possibilities as to the what and why of it all that she needed to know more details, and also, because she needed to know if she should be concerned about unexpected pudding herself.

"My final in class. Kanan thinks he's funny."

Maybe Summer did too, but only one of them had said they were out of rancors.

"...well, now I just feel cheated," Astrid said after a moment, "that none of my finals involved unexpected pudding."

Not really. There'd been a clown and an nearly-exploding robot. She was good.

"If you really want, there's probably still some in the shower." And it was squishy.

"Mmmmm," Astrid hummed as thoughtfully as she could without laughing, but the laugh eventually took over. "I'll have to think about that. If there's anything I was thinking my life needed when I woke up this morning, it was definitely shower pudding."

Just look at her totally rush to go get it, too.

"This place," Sabine said, shaking her head. "Always keeping you on your toes."

"Yeah," Astrid agreed, quietly laughing, though some of the mirth was taken out of her at that, and she turned back to the painting, carefully lining the edge of a petal with a swatch of pink. A thoughtful stroke, a pensive one. Monday really wasn't so far away anymore, after all. And she supposed she didn't even really have to say anything, she could just up and leave and there you go, but that seemed like a pretty crappy thing to do to the person she'd not hesitate to call her best friend while she was here.

But if Sabine was already late for work, the timing didn't seem that great. It didn't really leave a whole lot of time to talk about it...

...actually, maybe that made it the best time.

"Um," she managed, pushing herself into it, with the helpful distraction of the painting in front of her, "by the way, I got some news. From home. That...I know you should probably get going, though, so it can wait until you get back."

"I'm already late, I can be a few minutes more late," Sabine said, frowning. "Everything okay?"

It didn't sound okay from that.

"No," Astrid offered quickly, realizing now how her reluctance might have framed it. "No, it's not that. Everything's fine. It's...good news, actually. They found a family for me to live with. So they're sending me back."

And it was good news; Astrid was elated by it, her heart sort of lurching in her chest just thinking about it, but she couldn't deny that there were aspects about it that ultimately kind of sucked, too.

"Oh! That's great!" She didn't know a ton about Astrid's situation, mostly just through context clues. And as someone who was on her own, she got why Astrid would want this, too.

There were a lot of other things she wasn't thinking about yet, because it was kind of turning out to be a weird day for that.

"When?"

Astrid breathed out a little in relief. Good. That reaction was good, and she felt a little silly for feeling like it would have been anything but that. Of course Sabine would be happy for her. Why wouldn't she be?

"It is great," she agreed, now feeling like she could fully embrace it for what it was, as if she'd somehow needed permission to feel that way. Sure, she was going to miss this place like crazy, something that still sort of surprised her, but she was going home. Because her mother wanted her there so much that she made it happen. The next oleander was getting placed in large and up front, facing the source of light so it was almost entirely white with barely any shades of gray. "And my portal's scheduled for Monday. So...just enough time to really get this finished up."

Edited 2019-04-18 15:56 (UTC)

"Oh," Sabine said again, not sure why that surprised her. "That's soon."

"...yeah," Astrid said, after another pause, wondering if she should mention that she'd known for a while now, that the wheels had actually been in motion since not long after they'd gotten back from Iceland. "It's almost a little hard to wrap my brain around it."

Which wasn't untrue, even with the time she'd had to get used to it.

"It'll probably feel more real once you're actually there."

Sabine was even probably doing a decent job of pretending she was okay with this.

"Or surreal, even," Astrid noted. "It's going to be weird not waking up and checking the cupboards for gremlins every time I get breakfast. No one's even from space where I'm from, too. We barely even have the internet.

"I have an address, though," she offered, in conjunction with that. "Maybe we could still write to each other? Or send each other sketches. Someone's got to keep me up to date on the weirdest stuff happening out here."

"I'm not always the best at it," Sabine admitted. Which wasn't exactly true; she hadn't left a lot of situations where she could keep in touch. "For the right person I can make the effort."

"Maybe I'll make the cut, then," Astrid shrugged a little. "I'm sure I'll have plenty of interesting stories to share from my super-average, completely uninteresting world where squirrels don't even follow you around and write about what you do all day, too."

"I have absolutely no basis for what that's like," Sabine reminded her. Day trips to do something on the mainland did not count. "All my education there would come from you."

"Well, then," Astrid reasoned, "we'll keep in touch whenever you have a question about something completely and utterly mundane and normal. If you don't mind waiting a week or two for the letter."

There was a slight pause.

"Or maybe not, who knows. I'm still pretty far off on understanding this time traveling thing. But once I once I get the phone number at the new house, I can send that, and you can just call."

Sabine blinked. "Phone number at the new house?"

Oh this was new.

"They didn't include it in with the address," Astrid shrugged, "so I don't have the actual number yet, but, when I do, you can just call me. Assuming they don't have any weird rules about using the phone or something. And I probably won't get much of a chance to call. I bet the long distance rates on calling Maryland from California and twenty six years would be astronomical."

"At the house."

If Sabine thought things were primitive on Earth, the nineties were going to sound insane.

"This is all like a new language all of a sudden."

Astrid glanced over her shoulder at Sabine and blinked.

"Wait, it's the house part you're caught up on? Or the phone at the house thing?"

"The second thing. It just seems so much... harder," Sabine explained. She'd gotten a little spoiled in being able to talk to anyone immediately, and to not deal with house rules over phone use. It'd be an adjustment.

"I...guess," Astrid allowed, thinking about it, but she shrugged again. "It's pretty much what I'm used to, though. They gave me a cell phone when I left, but I never really used it much. I think the most use it got was getting texts from you about sixth floor parties. I'm not sure if I'll have to give that back; it was only supposed to be in case of emergencies."

And it was definitely nothing like what everyone else was running around with, either, that was for sure.

She grinned faintly. "If I'm really lucky, it'll even have a really long cord so I can maybe go into another room for privacy if anyone calls."

A cord, Sabine. A cord!

"I'm sorry, a what?"

Next she'd be saying other people could listen in just by picking up another phone, which was a huge security risk!

And, if you were lucky enough to have the internet, you couldn't even use that and the phone at the same time!

Astrid laughed a little, starting to wonder if it would at all be possible to ever have Sabine come out and visit her, or if that would just be mean to Sabine. "A cord," she repeated. "The phone has to be plugged into a line in the wall, and then there's a cord to connect the receiver to the base. Mostly. I guess they could have a cordless one."

And Astrid would know she'd hit the foster home lottery jackpot.

"What are the cars like?"

Because Earth's cars now were already weird.

"Four wheels? Two axels?" Astrid offered. "You know, I've never really paid much attention to any of the cars while we're off the island. They seem maybe a little sleeker? Curvier? Not that much different, though, from what I've noticed."

"Okay. That makes me feel better. I'm not sure what I expected, but..."

But you could have shown her a Flinstones car and said it was from then and after the phone thing she might believe it.

"That maybe you'd have to plug those in, too?"

Which actually WAS a thing now, Astrid, so...

"And you could only go as far as the cord would let you?"

"Well I wouldn't suggest that..." She'd think it, though.

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Room 210; Thursday [04/18].

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