usual happiness [ellie]

Gene didn’t have a real estimate of how many people in his life knew his most open secret -- obviously his parents and therapist and everybody else in therapy, and probably anybody who’d spent enough time with him and paid enough attention to him, but he wasn’t sure he knew how much attention anybody paid him. He paid himself rather a lot more attention than he paid other people, in conversation, and -- hopefully -- so did the rest of the world. It would be a load off his mind if so.

The group therapy was nice because, he’d noticed, he wasn’t the only idiot that compulsively shredded his fingers in his teeth as a stress response.

He put his backpack on and sent a glance sideways at Andrew of the wrecked fingernails and opted to continue not to be friends with Andrew (Andrew gave him a similarly furtive glance that made him think that he, too, was trying actively not to be his friend) and retreated straight back to the snack table to cherrypick the biscuit that had the fewest walnuts in it.

See -- Gene could spot a kindred soul easily enough, because it was nearly always on his mind: if he wasn’t gnawing on his knuckles or his lips, he was thinking about how he wasn’t. But he wasn’t entirely sure if un-kindred souls noticed the same things he did: if his compulsion disorder was as obvious as it felt, or if he just had the compulsion disorder version of gaydar. (Craydar, he decided. Picking out his fellow crazies.)

Only after a moment or two of carefully dissecting his biscuit to remove any nuts did he notice that he’d been approached; he sidestepped and tilted his head at the table to indicate that he was done. “The biscuits have walnuts in them,” he said, in case Eleanora needed the warning (or in case he needed to give an excuse for what he was doing to his food.)

@Eleanora Lovecraft

Eleanora had hated group therapy a year ago but over time she had more or less gotten accustomed to showing up, even if half of the time she’d find herself trained on a spot on the wall and moving in and out of listening as each person told their stories, series of achievements as well as difficulties they had dealt with throughout the week. Had Eleanora been actively taking care of her issues rather than desperately trying to forget they existed, she, too, might have also had something positive to say as opposed to the usual it was a so so week and I am okay sort of responses that composed most of what little she did say.

The girl enjoyed listened to the problems of others, not because she thrived on shadenfreude but because she had always believed that her problems were non-issues, that compared to everyone else in the room, she was there because her parents had paid enough money for it, and most importantly, meeting with other people with actual problems reminded her of that.

Therapy ended on some positive motivation type thing from the therapist and a general promise from everyone’s part to take the week’s events in stride. It seemed rather counterintuitive to tell people to actively take charge of their own reaction and at the same time disengage from things that caused them anxiety, but Eleanora figured that when you offered solutions, you forced the listener to take action and therefore, be responsible for whatever ill-effect it had in return. By offering all solutions, you remained relatively blameless, right?

Eleanora was one of the last people to get up, her comfortable spot on the arm chair a coveted one she only won once in blue moon and headed over to Gene. She had had a lot on her mind, much of it stemming from her conversations with Kai lately, but identity crisis and lack of information was not the sort of thing that her parent’s had signed her up for and so she felt odd discussing it. Looking as he picked the walnuts from the biscuits she smiled, “Are you allergic?” she wondered, “Or just not keen?” she followed up.
Eleanora had no opinion on the nut either way, if they were served to her she ate them, her mum found it incredibly unladylike to dislike food. “You didn’t say much today, you alright?” she started, realizing that starting with a line like You’re gay, right? didn’t bode well for the tone of conversation no matter how much she wanted to get right into her line of questioning. But lately, it was hard to remember how to act like a person, much less a normal one.

He hadn’t really spoken to Eleanora before -- from the start, he’d been anxious not to make friends at group therapy, because that was just sort of pathetic and because he didn’t need the help -- so he was surprised that she seemed interested in conversation with him. “Not allergic,” he said, “Just not keen. I am allergic to penicillin.” This had come up once but he sort of doubted she’d remember it: he said a lot at these things, and most of it would never be relevant to anybody.

Eleanora, on the other hand, said very little -- in two years of coming to this group he had learned next to nothing about her. He was depositing his handful of walnuts into the bin surreptitiously when he realised she was still next to him.

What was he meant to take from this line of questioning? The first thought he had was that she had noticed him not talking today, which was -- oy -- concerning. At least he was pretty sure they weren’t allowed to date anybody else in the group while they were still going to the same one and he could let her down the easy way, by pointing to the contract they’d all signed, rather than saying he was gay. Although -- he thought -- she probably knew that already, if she’d been paying attention to him in therapy enough to notice he hadn’t said much today.

Maybe she was a lesbian.

“I’m alright,” he said, not unsuspiciously. “Same old, same old… you know. Did you want something to eat?” He had the thought a moment late that she had asked after him to be polite, so he should have paid her back in kind. “How are you?” he added.

“Oh—” she started, staring a little purposelessly at the edible item and wondering what in the world Penicilin was and if she had heard of it. If that was supposed to be something to eat, she would steer clear from it on the name alone. “Walnuts have no business in biscuits anyway,” she offered after a moment’s pause, a moment of solidarity, she supposed, though Eleanora had not given much thought to walnuts or any other sorts of nuts lately, she was hardly picky about her food or anything, really (except her tea), and that was already a problem at home.

Same old, same old he said and it was a phrase that resonated with her greatly. Nothing really changed from one day to the next, she hadn’t gotten increasingly sadder or angrier or any more depressed, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure if there was a measure in that. She hadn’t been taking the potions she had been prescribed either but only because she couldn’t concentrate when she felt like she was walking around half asleep anyway. Not worse, but not better, either.

“I do know, yes,” she nodded, even if she knew that part of the sentence wasn’t particularly meant the way it was structured into the sentence. Eleanora had become so much more aware of things since she had been sort of propelled into the world of socializing, the English language was terribly complicated and full of nuances she didn’t want to understand. “Oh no, I can’t eat after all that crying,” she wrinkled her nose a little. Tess was at it again, this week a sorrowful tale of how she felt she was disconnecting with her cat. It was hard to know what was wrong with her but in a way, she was grateful for all the noise she made, at least that was less time spent trying to pry words from her.

“But I could go for a nice cup of earl grey,” she suggested, gesturing towards the door. It was a strange feeling because while Eleanora did not want to talk to anyone about her problems she still did miss socializing with others, to an extent, and out of all her “sad” therapy mates, Gene was the least imposing of them all. “Want to stick around a bit longer?” she wondered. She still needed to ask him that but it was probably better over a cup of tea. Everything was.

 

“Indeed they haven’t,” agreed Gene, although he was getting the sense that she didn’t really care. He poured the crumby corpse of his dewalnutted biscuit into his mouth from his cupped hand, and wiped its remains on his leg surreptitiously. Eleanora was kind of freaking him out now; she had definitely been standing here for too long to just be interested in the food, and for long enough that she wanted to talk to him, and she knew more about him than he knew about her, probably. Though Gene disliked the notion of being intimately understood, he had never really been able to resist a soapbox.

Perhaps she couldn’t eat just now, but, “I can,” said Gene, although he decided not to go for another biscuit in front of her. “You’re really missing out, you know, crying would make you hungry.” Not that he had ever cried here – he went to great lengths to avoid it, actually; once somebody had talked at length about reconciliation of magic and muggle faith and he’d nearly bit his pinky off at the knuckle.

She wanted him to stick around. This was now suspiciously friendly. This was veering into outside-of-therapy friendly and he was not sure he wanted to indulge it. He did anyway. “You like anywhere specific or should we just go to Diagon Alley?” They at least weren’t far – back when his dad had been driving him they’d usually hit the Leaky for lunch on their way home, as it was conveniently situated – but there were piles more pubs than teahouses, which had always baffled him as a kid, and baffled him still now that he’d reached the objective conclusion that alcohol did not taste good.

He reached the door before she did (long legs) and swung it open, leaned against the open door a bit. “It’s not against any like, therapy rules if we go Dutch, is it?” he said.

“Oh I think Tess does enough crying for the lot of us,” she said quietly, glancing around in hopes that Tess was not there to hear her speak ill of her because the last thing Eleanora wanted was to apologize for stating the obvious. And there wasn’t anything wrong with crying, she supposed that in part it was why people went to therapy, it simply was something she found impossible to do. Eleanora blamed her rigid upbringing but realistically, she had simply cried too much and resolved so little it all seemed pointless. Her crisis this time was of the existential variety.

“Can’t say I’m devastated about eating the crummy biscuits, either” she noted with a small smile that pulled just barely at the corner of her lips. The mention of Diagon Alley made her frown a little, the space was too synonymous with Hogwarts and that only made her think of—she shook her head instead. “Around the corner, there’s this little tea house, it’s quite good,” she offered instead. Eleanora had a talent for scouting locations, but mostly because she needed a place to hide from the crowd whenever she was in the area and what better place to hide than a little tea house around the corner when she was on the verge of going around the bend.

He seemed willing, at least that was what she assumed when he opened the door. “They might not be against therapy rules, but they are against mine,” she noted as she walked out of the door, the fresh air a nice change to the stifling tenseness within the therapy room walls. It was all that crying. “It’s my treat,” she clarified, “I’ll even get you proper biscuits,” she added proudly.

Gene let out a surprised snicker, then cut it off hastily, thinking that the only thing nearly as rude as what Eleanora had just said was to laugh at it. “P’raps,” he said, still grinning. Perhaps it was rude to gossip about what went on in a support group like this, but now suddenly he was bursting to. Perhaps he’d been bursting to all along, but knew he couldn’t say it to anybody but his parents, who would have had qualms about the confidentiality clause. Perhaps befriending people at therapy wasn’t such an insane idea after all.

Perhaps not.

“They’d just go to waste otherwise,” he pointed out, but shuddered theatrically (just restless) and stuck his hands in his robe pockets, so he wouldn’t be tempted to have another. She didn’t want to go to Diagon Alley; he accepted that readily, nodding as he pulled his cloak over his shoulders. “Sure,” he said. It didn’t really matter to him where they went, anyway. He hoped there was food; he was still hungry.

They departed; it wasn’t so cold, but Gene shuddered theatrically anyway once he was over the threshold, just to loosen his joints again, and to let some of his inherent antsiness dissipate like his breath.

Eleanora did not want to go Dutch; Gene was pretty sure that, to be polite, he was supposed to give this a token protest, so he said, “No, come on, I’ll get my own – I think I want a sandwich anyway. Which way’re we going? What’s the place called” He let her take the lead, hunching his shoulders up to lope along behind her, feeling (as he usually did when he was hanging around anybody a head shorter than him) fairly foolish. He hurried ahead and got the teahouse door, too.