#And then here I am sending a simple text message about a very low stakes thing to my mom who has been mostly loving and rational

[rokutouxei]

the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

ikemen vampire: temptation through the dark theo van gogh / mc | T | [ ao3 link in bio ]

The challenge seemed pretty simple: to try to befriend the university bookshop’s most sour employee, Theo van Gogh. As a literature major with a boatload of book recommendations on her back, it ought to be a simple task indeed. But as she uncovers what lies between Theo’s pages, the more she finds it harder to become closer to him without having to put the feeling directly into words. What can she learn from Theo about what it means to stay—and how can she teach Theo about what it means to let go? | written for ikevamp big bang 2020!

[ masterpost for all chapters ]

CHAPTER 11 OF 22

I tell her, grief is not a feeling but a neighborhood. This is where I come from. Everyone I love still lives there. - brenna twohy

--

She wakes up with one thought: that maybe she should apologize.

She can barely get out of bed carrying said thought in her head. She knows Theo is blunt, and maybe even in some ways a little too hardheaded for his own good, but—he couldn’t have meant any harm by saying that. And she’ll be damned before she admits this to him, but in a way, she’s starting to see that he’s a little right, after all.

That maybe she’s just looking for answers in the wrong places.

But at the same time… would it have killed him to say it a little kindlier? She nearly spills her coffee squeezing her mug too tight thinking of his face up at the rooftop—the rooftop she’d so nicely brought him to even if he had no right to be there in the first place—thinking of his voice, the words he said echoing over and over in her head. She’d replayed it over too many times now that she can’t even hear clearly in her mind what was said, just that it hurt. Just that it felt like being staked through the heart.

Sure, maybe he had good intentions, but isn’t the road to hell paved with just that?

“I hate you so fucking much,” she angrily shouts to no one in particular, half-meant and half for spite, grabbing her bag to go hunting for some advice.

--

The inside of Theo’s mouth tastes dull and coppery; he doesn’t know if it’s from the apology resting on his tongue or from the way he bites the inside of his cheek nervously. She never misses a day of coming to the bookshop, but it is Sunday at 2 pm and she is nowhere to be found.

His hands naturally gravitate towards his phone, and in his head, he forms the text message over and over again. The simplest I’m sorry, I overstepped and the most complicated I hadn’t meant to, and I shouldn’t have done it, if you would only forgive me- they’re written and rewritten in his mind in between each time he instinctually reaches for his phone.

He never does.

For the first half of the day, he tells himself it’s because he’ll feel better about calling her to apologize, rather than just sending a message. But he never does. And even when he thinks he’s ready to send a message to ask her if they could meet instead, the courage falls apart the moment he clicks on her name on the messaging app.

He’s never been that good with his words. Maybe when he figures what the best ones to say are, it’ll be too late.

--

Her first candidate is Vincent.

Vincent would know what to say. Or at least, he seems like the person who would know what to say, for any moment, for any problem. He just seems like the angel who has all the answers. But at the same time, consulting about Theo for Vincent doesn’t seem like the greatest idea. Besides the fact that Theo had made a parallel between her and Vincent to drive the point home. Maybe this was something she shouldn’t bring up between the brothers. So not Vincent.

Her next candidate is Arthur.

Arthur, of course, works with Theo, and is with Theo for basically most of the week—he’s easily the only other person she knows that’s as close to Theo as Vincent. Arthur would have a mighty piece of advice for sure, especially when it comes to Theo. She’s pretty close enough to him to talk about something like this as well. But the problem is that Arthur would also have a mighty piece of mind to show Theo if she’d reached out to him, no matter how much she will say about not telling Theo. Arthur can get pretty heated, and that’s not what she wants. So not Arthur.

Her last candidate is Dazai.

Dazai is her best friend and thus will probably understand her point of view the most. He understands how much she feels about getting out of this place and how much it matters for her, and will likely stand by her side if she tells this story. Of course, this just means that his scales are unfairly tilted for her—if he decides to bust out the scales at all. He’s pretty carefree as he is, and she could already hear what he’ll tell her—to “just let dumb dog lie”, meaning, to stop if he doesn’t care about her to begin with.

And she doesn’t want to do that.

So not Dazai.

She orders a hot chocolate from a different café (Vincent might be able to catch the look in her eye, and she doesn’t want to give out a clue, not when Theo presumably also came home in a bad mood) and walks down a random street, going nowhere in particular. Sundays are her designated chill days—the days where she doesn’t do work as much as possible or at least spend as much time as possible relaxing. This is why she goes to the bookshop on Sundays. But maybe not today. Instead, she walks. And the walk is helping in clearing her head, for sure, but she really wants someone to talk to, and—

She passes by the administrative building and it clicks.

--

“Come in!” he calls out from inside, and she enters the room with a spring in her step to seem a little more upbeat than she actually is.

“Hello Professor Newton,” she greets, shutting the door behind her with a smile. “Am I interrupting something?”

He murmurs her name lowly in surprise before shaking his head. “Not really, may I help you with anything?” he asks, although very carefully, as if already knowing she wasn’t here on official business.

Which was great, because that means she didn’t need to work too hard to get him into the mood. “It’s personal,” she says, with an awkward grin. “Is that okay?”

She makes her way to his desk but he gets up, instead gesturing towards the sofa on the other side of the room. She’s pretty sure this sofa is not his, but instead the other professor’s—the one with the room linked to his—but hey, if it’s in his spot, right? She takes a seat on it as Isaac crosses the room to a low table.

“Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee please!”

She hadn’t expected Isaac to be so open to talking to her about something… personal. She would say they were friends, but the older man didn’t seem to be so keen on her—or maybe he’s really just a recluse. Isaac’s doing his Ph.D. in some convoluted science, a full four years older than her. And… he seems so smart.

And that’s exactly why she chose him. Isaac is easy to fluster and surprise, and sure, maybe he’s one of the more socially inept people on the campus, but he still has a warm heart—that much she knows—and good, attentive pairs of eyes and ears that make him great at giving advice. He can seem cold, but her nights with the astronomy club prove that in the right circumstance, he is anything but.

She is praying that he is the same today.

He hands her a small teacup filled with coffee, placing the containers with sugar and milk next to it. He seems to have one filled with tea in his hands, and he gingerly sits down on the seat next to her. Instantly she feels like some teenager on her first trip to the therapist, about to lay down all her worries to be unwoven together and laid down in neat, straight strings. She’s nervous, sure, but also very comforted.

Isaac clears his throat and then sighs. “I… I don’t know why you’re going to me about this?”

“I think you’ll have the kind of thing I want to hear?” she offers, but she’s not too sure either. Isaac takes a sip from his tea.

“Aren’t you supposed to go to hear advice you need, not things you want to hear?” he quips back, but then purses his lips. “But if you’re so keen, let me hear it anyway.”

She sinks into relief.

--

Arthur elbows Theo gently. “What’s up with you today? You’re gloomier than usual.”

“Leave me alone, Bespectacled Demon.”

“Oooh, that’s new—and spicy. Little Miss upset you over something?”

Theo glares. “It’s none of your business.”

“I see, correct again, then,” Arthur says, clapping. “You know, sometimes I have to pause and wonder what she sees in you, when you’re all prickly like that all the time.”

For a moment, Theo wonders if she’d confided to Arthur. There’s really little by way of finding out, because Arthur generally talks as if he knows about everything in the first place. And Theo wasn’t in the mood to pry, or even bend under Arthur’s curiosity. Last night went into a direction Theo would not have expected it to go to, and now—now he only feels even more protective of the girl, by her similarity to Vincent. Maybe he should have been gentler after all.

“Thinking about it, big man? I’m telling you, you have to tell her what you mean sometimes. It’s better for you and—well, it makes girls swoon.”

“Do you live only to annoy me?” is what Theo decides to answer with, pushing Arthur away.

To which, Arthur smiles, leaning against the counter. “Sometimes the things that are best for us are the most repulsive at first.”

--

Isaac listens to her.

She outlines as much detail as she can with her heart already thumping in her throat. About growing up, about wanting to go away. About bringing Theo up to the rooftop because being there makes her feel safe. About the conversation they had, about what it made her feel. About how Theo usually talks, about how she feels like he didn’t mean harm in the first place, but it still hurts.

And the more she says the sillier she feels because—of course she goes to a professor, goes to the singular person she knows that seems to have been shoulder-deep into academics his entire life. Why is she talking about this to Isaac? Maybe she should have gone to Dazai.

Carefully, she puts the teacup down on its saucer and takes a deep breath once all that she can say has been said. She doesn’t have the courage to even look at Isaac now, feeling like he’s looking down on her. Why wasn’t she doing something more important instead of worrying about all this—like, why isn’t she working on her portfolio for submission instead? Or maybe she can try and do extracurriculars that will make her CV do a little bit better than anyone else’s? If she’s so keen on going away, then maybe she should be working on that instead of—all this.

Worrying about one mis-said thing.

“I’m sorry, it feels rather stupid to be consulting you about this, now that I’ve had time to think about it—and do it,” she says, cringing as she does. “It was me who asked for permission for us to hang out there too in the first place… And yet here I am.”

Isaac taps his fountain pen (covered, thankfully) thoughtfully against his face. He doesn’t have a notebook with him, but he’s been twirling it between his fingers as she was talking. He says it helps him think; and at this point, it’s just a tic that he does when he’s deep in thought. This makes her feel flustered for a moment; is he really taking her so seriously? Over something so little?

“But this isn’t about the rooftop,” Isaac says, slowly. “This is about Theodorus.”

She blinks. “Well… yes, I guess,” she offers. And then: “I’m sorry, Isaac, I shouldn’t have come here after all… I didn’t want to waste your time, maybe I should have just… told you on the next session at the rooftop that I won’t be bringing him there anymore…” She closes her grip against her bag and begins to stand up. “I think that’s really all I wanted to say—"

“No,” Isaac says, suddenly, and his voice makes her sit down again. Isaac is like that, but he’s still a professor, and, well, he can have quite a voice when he decides to. “I—I mean, you didn’t… come here to tell me that, didn’t you? You came here to ask me for…” he bites his lip. “Advice.”

A flutter of joy begins to grow in her stomach. Dazai is right—it is some sort of exciting when Isaac comes out of his shell. “…Yes, if you had any,” she answers, now more steady. “Of course, if you don’t, it’s entirely alright… I just needed to tell someone, I think.”

Isaac is quiet for a moment. Then he begins. “Don’t worry about the rooftop,” he says. “Come and use it as you please—I trust you’ll be responsible for it.”

Well, that wasn’t the advice she expected. “Of course, sir.”

“I wouldn’t have entrusted the keys to you otherwise,” he says, before looking up at her. “And no sirs. I’m  not— I’m not talking to you as your club professor right now. I’m talking to you as your…”

She looks up, but she doesn’t make any sound, looking at him intently.

Isaac coughs, then looks away. “F—friend.”

(A burst of color at the back of her eyes. Holy shit, screw romance, why does friendship feel this good?)

“Yes,” she says eagerly, “I never thought I’d hear that from you ever.”

He refuses to look at her and hides behind a sip of tea. When she giggles at him, he groans. “Can we go back to your problem, please?”

--

The tea in the pot is long cold when she left Isaac’s office, the rest of the faculty already having driven home. Outside, the streetlamps are only beginning to flicker on, illuminating the familiar avenues in their still-weak orange glow.

And she is standing outside the physics building feeling very, very small—perhaps the kind of way a culture of bacteria feels like sitting in a petri dish underneath a high-tech microscope.

Very small, and very, very seen.

Isaac had fumbled for words and stuttered and his sentences ran over each other—but he gave his advice anyway, tried to make sense of the knots of a feeling she had handed him and undo them, weave them into something a little more understandable. And yes, sure, this Isaac, bungling up his words and pausing every few seconds as if recalibrating his mind is very, very different from the Isaac she’d seen once in his higher physics classes (she and Dazai secretly sat-in: she didn’t understand a single word but it was so refreshing to see Isaac in his natural element), but it was this Isaac who was her friend, who was trying his best to help her when even he seems to be so dense to his own emotions sometimes.

She had expected Isaac to give her a new point of view; to see the situation the kind of way a hard scientist would, in between hypotheses and laws and experiments, the kind one applied the scientific method on and one could plaster many tables and charts in a paper for. Of course, since she was seeking advice, she wouldn’t have said it out loud, but deep in her heart she hoped Isaac would say something like “Ditch him” or “It was a wrong thing to say”—the kind of thing Dazai would say but at least from the mouth of a man who isn’t too obviously on her side. But instead, Isaac said:

“The longer you deny the facts the more undeniable they become.”

Said it like it was fact, like it was some sort of sure scientific law that should have been known to common man. Kind of like gravity. Said with absolute truth—said as if she should have had the basic common sense to learn about this. But Isaac had learned this adage the hard way too—in his experiments and trials when things didn’t go right, when the math didn’t add up, the harder he tried to disprove what was already there, the worse his time became.

Science isn’t about changing what is already there. It is about understanding what is, and then deciding how we can change the way we move around it, how to harness it, to make our lives a little better.

And the science of it is this: she doesn’t want to apologize to Theo. In fact, maybe she ought not to. It was him who dealt the blow, so why does she have to be the one making excuses and apologies out of it? But at the same time—she doesn’t want to also be the reason he doesn’t want to apologize. Sure, she’s hurt, but at the end of the day…

She still wants this friendship back.

Theo is good company and she’d love to have him back.

Luckily, she knows just the right way to science their way back into friends.

--

She’s always in the bookshop on Sundays.

Even in the worst of weather. Even if she doesn’t have to buy anything. Even if all she’ll do inside is look at the fresh stock in the New Reads section for an hour and then go home.

She comes on Sundays and Wednesdays, no other days of the week.

So when she doesn’t come on Sunday, Theo feels a little unsettled.

And when she comes in on a Monday—Theo is even more taken aback.

She doesn’t peer through the window to check inside like she usually does, just hops off her bike once she rounds the corner, locks it into the bike rack (sadly out of Theo’s vision, so he doesn’t get to actually gauge her expression before she comes in) and then pushes the door open; the bells on the doorway tinkle when she does so.

Theo tries to put a little pep into his voice when he says “Welcome to Dragon’s Hoard,” but the only thing the dragon in him is hoarding right now is … well, remorse.

It’s an off hour for her too—four in the afternoon, perhaps after class?—but it doesn’t seem to matter to her as she strides right up at the register. It’s a good thing Arthur went out to get them some coffee a few blocks down, so Theo is alone.

“Nice weather today, huh?” she says by way of greeting, once she gets there. It’s not bad. Rather windy, and she’s definitely got on extra layer of outerwear on for the temperature.

But she’s not here for the weather and he knows.

He was preparing an apology, to be rather honest—and he didn’t feel like he could get away with a simple I’m sorry, not when he ran his mouth like that. He hadn’t finished thinking about said apology though, and Arthur was already teasing him for spending so much time zoning out thinking of how to appease the “Little Miss.” No matter. Despite the unreadiness, Theo attempts to form words anyway: “Look, I—I’m sorry,” he says, looking her straight in the eye to make sure she sees he means it.  “I said too much and I didn’t consider. I shouldn’t have.”

“Thanks,” she says, beaming at him in a way he thought she would never let him see again. “That means a lot. Sorry for running out on you like that, too.”

“You had every right to.”

“Still, it wasn’t the right thing to do.” She takes a deep breath to steady herself. “I’ve been chewing on it for the past few days and… you were only looking out for me, and I wanted to thank you for that. Couldn’t have killed you to say it a little more gently though.”

He grimaces. “I’ll try better.”

“Thanks, Theo,” she says with a smile. “I kind of don’t want to say it, but I also think you’re kind of right about it, actually.”

“About what?”

“About why I want to go away and all that.”

Theo only nods quietly, watching as she stares out the window like she’s deep in thought. Sometimes he wonders what kind of things are actually going on in that mind of hers. She seems to always be considering something for the future—never stopping in one place.

“Maybe you are right that I don’t really need to go away,” she says, still not facing him. “Maybe I’m just psyching myself out for an out there that isn’t really as good as I dream it will be. But you know? Maybe it’s a lesson I’ll have to learn on my own.” She turns to him with that confident expression on her face again. “Maybe I’ll need to go away and then consider staying. Think you can live with that?”

He snorts. He doesn’t mean to, but it comes out of him, and with that sound he feels like they’re back to before once again. “You make it sound like I have a choice in this matter.”

She laughs. “Hmm, well you do, but you’ll have to work a little harder than that to get me out of your life now that we’re friends. Just wanted to say thanks for putting that thought in me, yanno?” She cocks her head to the side. “...And, really. You were the first person I wanted to tell about me passing the first round and all that. No spite this time.”

And it feels right to tell him. She hadn’t gotten to because she felt like she wanted it to sink in first, and then they got into the fight before she was able to tell him at the rooftop, but—it feels just right as breathing to be telling him about this. Sure, he’s supposed to be nothing more than a distraction, but he’s proven himself to be a very worthy distraction, so full of intellectual discourse and banter from the beginning. This isn’t going the way she thought it would be going but it’s a good place. Besides, now she knows—that Theo just wants the best for her.

But before Theo can say his congratulations properly this time around, she says, “I was thinking, maybe you could save your claps and instead help me get a book…”

--

A ten-minute argument over student discounts, staff discounts, and what friendship ought to actually mean later, it is decided, by way of Theo’s gratefully granted apology, that she gets to go home with an anthology of modern poetry, at staff price.