let be what is, let be what isn't

[WT]

"Oh yeah, the lamb's ear's new!" You jerk your hands back reflexively, then settle them gently back into the leaves when Suman waves in the corner of your vision and says, "No, go ahead. Good texture, huh?"

"Texture," you agree emphatically, for once not bothering to scramble for more words. Suman can't always tell what you mean, but he does ask whenever he gets confused, and he doesn't ask now. "How new?"

"Swiped a sample from the greenhouse disposal the other week," he says as he settles a couple feet away. The plate he's carrying goes between you, in equally easy reach, and he takes a piece of cheese with him as he leans back against the wall. "It's a little hard to grow inside, but I like having it around."

"Why?" You sacrifice a hand from the plant to take a cracker, which you nibble cautiously along an edge.

"Why is it hard, or why do I like it?" You hold up one finger; you can tell for yourself why someone would like this plant. "Wants more sun, for starters. Better drainage wouldn't hurt. Least this way it's easy to contain, though." You make a quizzical sound in the top of your throat. "Uh, it's a mint relative, do you know how mint—sure, okay. The thing about mint is, it wants a lot of water, so it puts out runners, and it's not real picky about soil, so you look away for two seconds and next thing you know you've got mint in..."

All things being equal, you absolutely could not care less about climate zones, soil types, or the mechanics of runners as compared to creeping stems in certain members of the family Lamiaceae. But talking about these things makes Suman happy, and you do care about that. Every time you bump into him in the halls lately he's fretting about exams and some assignment or another he feels like he should already have finished; and he likes the College, he wanted to go, it's not like—but even so. It's good to hear him enthusiastic again.

So you listen and learn, and if you sometimes forget to prove it by looking at Suman or making agreeable noises, he recognizes the thoughtful way you keep petting the lamb's ear and keeps talking anyway. The food dwindles slowly, with you pecking your way through a steady stream of crackers and Suman scarfing one at a time with cheese between stretches of forgetting the plate exists. When the plate empties, and then when the topic drifts, you feel your eyes start to flicker and tell yourself firmly to calm down; you'll know when you should go because whoever gets tired first will say so, and then you will. This is, if not yet quite routine, safely predictable. Dependable.

You aren't sure what turns an acquaintance into a friend. Calling him the one feels cold, and the other feels presumptuous, but you don't know how to ask without mortifying both of you. You like being able to call him my neighbor, a simple statement with no room for ambiguity or risk.

If you had to guess, though, you'd say you're glad to be friends.

title song is "Grow" by the Oh Hellos.

WT 00:17
[...] and he and Name are like, very slowly bonding over "I don't always understand your particular brainweirds but I would die for your right to feel comfortable about them"

this is a little :melting_clock: but didn't feel like it belonged in Character Development any better than it belongs here? anyway, sometimes you write a throwaway line about an npc and get super distracted figuring out who that person is, it's fine, my writing habits and also priorities are totally organized and not at all :melting_clock: in and of themselves

[WT]

You take to the rhythm of kneading as if it were your own missing heartbeat: press, fold, press, fold, humming tunelessly and swaying softly on your toes with the motion. You like making bread, it turns out, as much as you like eating it; the moments of tacky dough sticking to your fingers and periodic fights with your barely-functional oven are acceptable costs for the satisfied burn that sets into your arms halfway through the process and the comforting smell that permeates your home. In the long run it's cheaper to make it than buy it, too, though you did have to save before you started. A basic loaf takes fewer ingredients than you might have guessed, but you wanted a good sum in hand to offer before you risked asking for a lesson at the bakery.

That went better than you expected—better, frankly, than you prepared for. You imagined rejection, both cruel and kind (why, after all, should the baker help you need to support his livelihood less often?), and rehearsed what you hoped were gracious responses. You imagined simple lack of talent, your hands not built for this new and peaceful task, and told yourself in advance that you would at least be proud for trying. You did not imagine, and did not know how to handle, one of the sometimes-cashiers—the baker's child, you think; their hair is darker and not so curly, but they have the same warm orange glow under their brown skin—telling you that if you're interested in learning more, they're always looking for help. That no one looks in a kitchen for a glamorous job, or one with a high salary or easy hours, but they can offer stability and an employee's share of the day-old loaves.

"I don't know if I can," you said quietly, then bit your lip and didn't correct them when they took that as evidence of insecurity instead of commentary on your status as a legal ghost. As long as you pay her on time, the woman who owns your apartment asks no questions, and you take scattered, temporary jobs for a reason. You don't know how your forged identity would hold up under actual employment, or whether it would put whoever hired you at risk.

Maybe they would help, if you explained. Maybe not. There are things you still don't trust anyone—yourself included—enough to talk about.

It's a nice idea, though, that life: waking before dawn for your shift, sliding dough into the oven in time to lay loaves and pastries out behind the counter before the doors open, timing your days by the rise and fall of noise from the front room. You can imagine settling into the routine of it, the repetition; you can almost, if you try, imagine a sense of steadiness you haven't felt in years. You would take a break at midmorning to eat a lunch you prepared the night before, and stop to offer scraps to the cats on your way home just after everyone else's lunchtime. Afternoons would be for the Square, or once in a while for bringing a set of pastries next door to share while you read and Suman wrote lab reports. District Six might, at last, feel more like a home than a stolen chance you spend your life waiting to be chased away from.

For now, this—something you can share taking shape under your hands, time spent how you like without anyone standing over your shoulder to say you chose wrong—is more than you once knew it could be possible to dream of. You'll hold on to that, with every bit of stubborn resilience driven into you and every bit of gentle care you folded into your own heart, for as long as you can.

this is the Name Does Miscellaneous Stuff vignette thread now, apparently? I was not planning on that but sometimes a person's just gotta doodle a tiny slightly-temporally-ambiguous slice-of-life thing and then might as well collect it with the others.

[WT]

"Why do you guess that nothing is happening," you ask, tapping the section of the page labeled H₀ with one ring finger, "when you're only doing it because you know something is happening?"

"I don't know, I'm hypothesizing. You always start from the assumption that there's no relationship."

"Yes," you say, tapping a little more rapidly, "but why?"

Suman kicks his chair back on two legs, anchored precariously by one foot under the table, and shakes his hands out in front of him. "You don't exactly prove things with experiments. It's more like—okay. Say I think..." He pauses, then points with a flourish at the nearest potted plant, a light green thing with flowers so dark and droopy that you would think it was sick if Suman had spared it more than a glance. "Say I think honeywart grows better with more sun—I mean, it does, but pretend we don't know that." You, who five seconds ago did not know that, eye the plant sidelong and nod. "I can't actually get together every Cerinthe major specimen in the world, so any result I get from a test might only be true for the plants I tested. Maybe the ones I put in full sun grow more on average, but I can't tell whether it's really the sun. Maybe that group always would have been taller than the other ones. That's sampling error. Okay?"

He waits while you digest that, fingertips of both hands tapping now and your eyes tracing the outline of the honeywart's leaves. "But you said they do. Grow better." You flick your eyes to Suman, then back to the plants. "So someone had to figure it out."

"Only as—I could have phrased that better. Go with it for now?"

Your hands settle against the edge of the table. "Mm."

"So if I can't prove either explanation is true for every possible test, I have to figure out which one is more likely."

"The weird math," you say, looking back to a long section of numbers squeezed into the margins.

"The weird math," Suman says, more drily. "You work out—how likely is this result, if the null hypothesis is true. It's a reference point, not—"

You're listening. You are. His voice shifts in pitch and rhythm, as unceasing as the pressure of wood under your fingers even as it refuses to resolve into words; but your skin wants to be in an office, in a waiting room, on a table, by a tank, cold where the doctor hasn't let you roll down your sleeve yet, cold enough to distract you from a voice that doesn't need to turn into words for you to understand that this program could be more than you're making it, if you only tried harder, did better, did it right, made yourself—

"Hey," Suman says, which is how you realize that he did fall silent eventually after all. "Have a leaf."

He doesn't say it gently—Suman isn't much better than you at gentle—but his tone is easy, light, and you manage a ragged smile as you reach out the piece of lamb's ear he extends toward you and wind it through the fingers of one hand, then the other. It feels better than you expected to stretch them; they're stiff from the way you clamped down unconsciously on the table. "Thanks."

"Yeah." He hesitates for a beat. "You weren't answering. Does that... happen for you sometimes, or did I say something?"

"Yes. Both." You shrug tightly and look away, because that's easier than fighting out the words to explain that you appreciate that he cares but the cautious way he's looking at you makes you want to grind your bones into the table again. "Not your fault. It shouldn't be..."

"I mean," Suman says when you fail to finish that thought, "sometimes I start crying because I can't decide what to make for dinner." You crack another smile at that, small and sympathetic, only for it to fall as he adds, "Can you tell me what I said? So I know what to avoid."

He waits as you consider that, looking for the least amount of context you can offer that will still make your answer make sense. "I'm not, I, I wasn't always—" a person won't go over well, but that's where your throat sticks. You swallow and press the leaf over your mouth; you don't know how to talk about this, don't want to talk about this, except you do want to explain. You want to make yourself make sense, if only to one person.

"I know you're not from Six," Suman says, "if that's the problem."

Later, you think, you'll be grateful for this—grateful that he took the wondering and worrying away in one fell swoop, and never for a moment made you guess whether he would try to use this against you. In the moment, you're busy trying not to choke on air. "What."

"Don't worry, your accent's good," Suman says, almost tripping over his own words in his rush to reassure you, and you laugh tonelessly into your fingertips. "You just slide a little when you're tired, I think. You get a little... Upper, around the vowels."

"A little Upper around the vowels," you murmur.

That's a lament, not a question, but Suman answers anyway. "Only sometimes! Not right then. Kind of—" He hesitates. "Do you want me to guess?"

You half-laugh again. "Why not."

"One, maybe Four?"

"Ripred," you mutter, dropping the leaf and lowering your head to rub the heels of your hands into your eyes. "Okay." This is good. This is the type of feedback you could have used two years ago, when you were first untangling the idea that the accents you heard on television came bundled with new words for sandwiches and bugs and a thousand little things that could make you seem more out of place than you already had to. You can use this, and you will not waste time overthinking conversations you couldn't change even if you could remember them in perfect detail.

You will not.

"The hypothesis," you blurt, retrieving the leaf and lifting your chin the way you used to remind yourself to do as you stepped onto the training floor. "The type. I—null." You tense again with the phrase, but only for a moment before you forcibly relax your hands and smooth out the leaf. "That was what—that was the problem."

"Sorry."

"You didn't know." You meet Suman's eyes straight on for once, needing to make sure he knows you mean this. "It's good to associate it with something else." Sunlight and greenery and learning, and a person who tells you about his work the way he would talk to any of his classmates and brings you something soft when you need it instead of telling you to pay better attention. Experiments that have nothing to do with you at all.

You're not a placeholder or a variable or a failed version of something someone else tried to create. The Type: Full scientists have no one to blame but themselves.

"Tell me how they work again," you say. "I missed the last bit. I'm ready this time."



null hypotheses annoyed the hell out of me in middle school because none of my science teachers ever actually explained what they were for? just that I had to write them.

Suman actually kinda likes the math but Name never took a stats class and trying to explain data analysis to them was an exercise in frustration for everyone involved.

[WT]

sometimes I think I know exactly what I've got in store
but I don't want to cheapen everything that's come before

You like this game more than you expected to. You were comfortable letting conversation wash over you at the edge of the group, and tried to stay put, stammering excuses, when Sanvi waved you forward to claim a pile of cards—but she wouldn't take no for an answer, only waving harder when you said you'd never played, and you're warmly surprised to find that you're glad for that now.

It turns out the whole point is that no one knows all the rules because you're all making this game up together as you go. No one can laugh when you don't know what you're doing—or rather, they can and do, but only in the lightly teasing way they also laugh at each other and themselves. And once you accept that it's okay to be confused, you learn that you're good at this; reading strangers' tells and bluffs is beyond you, but your brain likes patterns, and that's all it is, really. Watching when people draw and when they pass, taking note of which plays stay down and which have to be taken back, building evidence into ideas into theories into discovery. Like science experiments, you joke to Suman, and you laugh without embarrassment when he gestures without missing a beat for you to draw a card for talking.

In the hallway a few hours ago, clinging to your box of dough for reassurance, you told yourself to make a good impression and kept your feet deliberately flat. Now, when someone calls for a break between rounds, you cautiously walk to the kitchen on your toes not because you're nervous and need the pressure but simply because you think these people might let you. If anyone notices, they don't mention it.

Suman catches up with you in the kitchen, refilling his water and then kneeling to join you in staring through the window of his stove at your slowly browning baklava. "You holding up okay?"

"Yeah," you say without looking up. You hadn't been sure at first; you've never been to a party, even a quiet little one like this, and meeting Suman's university friends sounded like a lot of pressure. But it isn't as overwhelming as you feared. Suman's apartment feels full without being stifling and smells like the dinner you all cooked together and sounds like a day at the park. You'll be tired at the end of the night, but it will have been worth it. "I'm just—" you knock the front of the stove with one knuckle—"checking."

Your fingers flutter, but you resist opening the door and letting all the hot air out just so you can stick a fork in to confirm what you already know. Trust the process, Ty keeps telling you as you learn to take over more of the pastries, and you're learning to do exactly that; sometimes you have to measure and knead and mold with all the precise care you can muster, but sometimes you have to trust the work you've already put in, take your hands off, and let things happen.

"Need a hand in here?"

"Here—?" You do look up at that; Elijah is leaning casually into the kitchen with a hand on the doorframe, and he waggles the fingers of his other hand at you as you stand. "It needs longer, but I should start sauce soon. You can help. If, um—I mean, if you want." Ty's recipe in your pocket is basic enough that you shouldn't need help, but you think he's offering more to be friendly than anything else, the way everyone helped Suman bread the chicken earlier when one person would have been fine. You want him to know you appreciate the gesture. And his tomato sauce was good; you trust him not to burn the sugar. "Thanks."

"Soon like five minutes," Suman asks, "or soon like next time we break?"

You glance at the baklava again and nod firmly. "Break."

"Got it," Elijah says with a thumbs up. "I'll go try to get everyone rounded up to restart."

Suman waits until the two of you hear Elijah's voice again, now talking to someone at the dining table, before he knocks one of his ankles gently against one of yours. "They like you."

You duck your head, but glance at him out of the corner of your eye, unable not to smile and glad to see him grinning back. "I like them." Inasmuch as you can when you've barely met them, but even without really knowing these people, you see why Suman likes them and you agree; you like Elijah's easy cheer, Sanvi's unselfconscious exuberance, the quirk in Sargassum's smile when she's thinking, the way Rio hums absentmindedly with their mood. You like how even in these couple hours you've seen them work as a group around the parts of each other that might clash—how Sargassum checked before sprawling across Elijah's lap, how Sanvi casually shifted so she could fidget without the rhythm of her foot waving distracting Suman. It can't always be this clean, this easy, but they've clearly survived the times when it wasn't. They're a good group. "I'm glad I came."

Suman puts his hand out flat and you reach up to tap your palms together, a sort of slow high-five the two of you worked out as a substitute for a hug. "Me too."

A year and change ago, you wouldn't have believed him. But you're getting used to people liking you—wanting you around, even. You can make mistakes at the bakery these days without a flood of nauseating terror that Leon will fire you or Ty will decide they're tired of teaching you; you sit with the other employees on break instead of hiding outside; you reach out to people first sometimes, to ask Caitlin what she's been drawing lately or convince Suman to take a walk on a nice day. Getting yourself through the door was hard, but now that you're here, you don't need to be reminded you're allowed to stay. Not tonight, at least.

"The baklava team is starting with extra cards if they don't get out here!" Sanvi calls.

"The baklava is all Name," Suman calls back.

You scrunch your nose at him. "Are you being polite about credit or trying to get ahead of me in cards?"

"Both?" he says, and laughs as you scrunch your nose harder. "But yeah, we should go if they're ready. We're good here, right?"

He's pointing at the oven, but you're listening to the chatter from the next room as you nod. There will always, you suspect, be ghosts haunting you and things you flinch at and days when the world scrapes against your skin in ways you can't handle; there will always be times when you feel like you have to fold your limbs down and invent excuses to exist in other people's lives. You will never think about everyone you left at Aether without grief and guilt and horror, and you don't know whether you'll ever figure out what you can do to make things right. But here, tonight—Suman wanted you here, and Sanvi wanted to teach you to play cards, and Elijah wanted to help with the baklava, not because any of them got anything out of it but for the sake of spending time with you. You like these people, and even if you have trouble wrapping your mind around why, you can accept that they like you as well.

You hold your own hand up, Suman taps it, and you smile at your best friend. "We're good here."

and in spite of all the changes coming each and every day
we know that in the end, it's gonna be okay;
we may not ever even know what that really means to say
but we know that in the end, it's gonna be okay

lyrics song is "Existential Heckle" by The Yellow Dress.

wanted post 2000 to be a brief slice-of-life ode to the stories I've treasured here about getting through hard times and finding ways to build something better. ("brief" I say and then ramble about cards and baking for twice as long as I expected; this too is probably true to form, haha.) it's been a long time and a lot of words; as ever, :rev:.