Welcome to Gaia! ::

With Dani still an untouched number in his cellphone, Parker was calling Tate more and more. He tried to fill the hole in his life with someone else he cared about. Apparently, that was Tate. They were friends, good friends, and Parker did not see her as a romantic interest. That didn't stop the speculation, mostly from his roommate and other Hillworth classmates who insisted he was off "******** his new girlfriend again." Whatever. Parker had nothing to prove to them.

After the nightmare that woke him and the rejection letter from Northeastern, Parker just wanted to focus on doing something with his life. That meant searching for tech jobs in the paper. Hillworth would kick his a** to the curb the second he graduated, and though his freelance computer repair job paid the few bills he had, it was not stable enough to depend on long term. Parker had been denied from every college he had applied to -- except one. And he was wait-listed. And it was nowhere near his top choice. Apparently his poor permanent record of behavior from Hillworth was enough to sink his future. The thought made his stomach turn. No, Parker needed a job, and Tate was the one to help him.

Even if that meant being dragged to the beach.

Before Parker moved to Destiny City, he lived in a landlocked place. He had a single good memory of the beach -- a day spent with his mother building sandcastles. His resistance to visit the beach was tied up in that memory. He didn't want anything else to compete with it. And yet, there he was, sitting cross-legged on a stiff bench and eating Mongolian beef with his fingers.

"Goddamnit, the wind is going to tear the ad papers in half," he said, tossing his leg over the bundle of papers to keep them from blowing away. Winter was gone, but there was still a chill in the air. Parker liked it that way. The beach was nearly empty. He turned to the next page, and a gust of wind blew it straight into his face. "******** it," he said, wrangling the paper back into the pile. "We're here at the beach -- as per your request. Let's go sit in the sand or something. This bench is making my a** hurt."

He didn't wait for Tate to respond. Parker tucked the ad pages under his arm and started to wander off toward the horizon.

(( HAH. When we planned to make this at the beach, I didn't think about this, but Parker is going to be the Senshi of Sand. And they are randomly at a beach. With lots of sand. Every time I write about him in the sand, it makes me lol a little. CAN HE SENSE IT CALLING TO HIM? ))



Parker flopped into the sand. It was cool to the touch, even through his jeans. He leaned forward and unlaced his Converses, setting them to the side and tucking his socks inside. College -- yeah. Sore subject. "How's the boyfriend?" he said, shooting her an annoyed glare. He wasn't really asking, just giving her s**t. These were both subjects neither of them really wanted to discuss.

Until this point, Parker had tried his best not to talk to anyone about his college prospects. Tate just happened to be one of the people who knew where he had applied and knew that he would be hearing soon. He'd done it to himself by talking to her about it in the first place. Parker sighed and dug his feet into the sand, stared at them. "I got denied from Northeastern yesterday." His voice was cold, hollow. "I only applied to DC Community as a back up to my back up. And they didn't even accept me. I'm wait-listed." Tate knew this. Parker was just repeating. It still stunned him.

His hand disappeared under the sand and came up holding a seashell. Parker stared at it, sighed, and then chucked it out into the water. "******** Hillworth." His behavior record had to be the cause of all this disappointment. Parker made a decent score on the SAT -- definitely good enough for DCU -- and his GPA wasn't bad. Okay, so he didn't have any extracurriculars, but lots of people didn't. No... it was Hillworth. Parker could feel it.

Hillworth had ruined his high school experience, and now it would doom him for college too. "I need a job," he said at last and then looked at her. "A real job. No more freelance bullshit. I need a place where I can clock in and get a steady pay check. If DC Community denies me..." He shook his head. "If they deny me, I will be living on your couch." Parker wasn't being serious. He hadn't ever considered having a roommate until Northeastern denied him. DC was an expensive place to live, and splitting the rent was one way to save some cash.

So far, Parker was still trying not to accept his blanket rejection from college, even as he half-heartedly searched the Help Wanted ads.

Parker was used to Tate being weird. The sand ball was weird. He ignored it, just like she ignored when he whipped out his notebook at a moment's notice to scribble something illegible down. When she crushed it back into the sand, Parker brushed at his hair and then reached for another ad page.

"Geek Squad, jesus," he said, shaking his head. It was the corporate perversion of true techies, painted employees in black and white driving pimple-sized douchemobiles. The thought left a bad taste in his mouth and a worse image in his head. Geek Squad was more lax about their hiring than other agencies, but Parker didn't exactly want to be a part of the B Team of computer repair. "It might be my only option," he said with disgust, both to himself and Tate. "<********>, man. Just... <********>." The situation was only growing worse. No Dani, no college, no job. <********, no hope.

Parker raked a hand through his hair, but he couldn't shake the thought. It congealed in his brain like overcooked cheese. Maybe egging someone's house would help. "You mean Jaimie's girlfriend?" he said, turning over his shoulder. Tate was on her feet and wading in the surf. She almost looked girlish, the way she dipped her feet into the water. Parker stood up and crossed next to her.

"You've got something against Captain America?"

Parker didn't like or dislike Tallulah. She was Jaimie's girlfriend, and what little he knew about her was peppered with her involvement in Model UN. Dani mentioned it on occasion and Jaimie, too, in passing.

Parker had no idea what Tate was talking about with all the Model UN stuff so he just nodded, distracting himself with the cool sensation of the sand. Each grain could have come from anywhere in the world, mixed and swept and washed until it landed here. Was there beauty in that? Dani might think so. It was the kind of thought he could share with her that would make her smile and wrap her arms around his neck. It... was.

The sun was hidden behind puffy white clouds, but it cast a hazy shine across the water, the glow peaking around the white edges like burgeoning petals. It was pretty, in a way, not that Parker would say so. "A butterfly, huh?" His eyes were still on the clouds, but he shook his head, tossing thick strands of dark hair over his eyes. Goddamn, he needed a hair cut. His mother would tell him he looked Shakespearean. She always tried to find the bright side. She was always an optimist. Maybe if she'd been around longer, Parker would have been too?

The thought made the clouds above him seem less beautiful. "Books were supposed to be my life. College was supposed to be my open door." Parker sunk his feet deeper in the sand, digging through the soft grains until he hit the hard-packed layer. "What if this was it? What if this was my only shot to do something important with my life?" He couldn't bring himself to look at Tate, never could when he touched on seriousness.

Instead, he glanced back to his shoes lying a few feet away. The tide was licking up to them so he doubled back to toss them farther away, almost to the bench and his forgotten container of Mongolian beef. Parker took his time coming back to Tate's side.

Parker could appreciate a person who used someone else's words. He did it all the time when he wasn't sure enough of his own. It was a defense mechanism, and one that gave him that special flavor of douchebag that rubbed most people the wrong way. It didn't stop him from thinking Tate was trying to make fun of it.

He assumed this most of the time anyway.

Parker laced his fingers together and put both hands on top of his head. "You sound like me, grasshopper." The laughter was dying, and for a moment, all was quiet save the rush of gentle waves and the cawing of the gulls.

Tate punched him in the arm.

"Ouch," he said, grabbing for her wrist and tugging her toward him. "Didn't anyone tell you it was wrong to hit people?" Parker smirked and gave her arm another tug. Tate sneered. There was something in her teeth, a few of them actually. The downside of the garlic noodles, apparently.

Parker started to reach into his pocket. "You have s**t all in your teeth," he said, laughing again. "I can't take you seriously with that. Here, look--" His hand reemerged, and Parker held a small hand mirror directly in front of Tate's face.

What was going on? Parker narrowed his eyes at Tate. He never expected her to rip the mirror from his hand, let alone toss it down to the sand at their feet. The tide was moving over the grains, tugging shells and shards of glass. Glass?

"s**t, Tate," he said, scrambling toward the mirror. His fingers dug in the sand, and he winced. "You cracked it! You ******** cracked it on a seashell." Parker stood up, the mirror in one hand and a sliver of glass sticking out of his index finger. He tugged it out and tossed it away, flipping the mirror back over.

It was a small thing, but a chunk of the mirrored surface was missing and the rest was riddled with branching cracks. "Jesus, Tate: what is your issue?" He turned it over in his hand again. The back of the mirror was pale blue and had the initials DMR printed on it. Parker scowled.

Tate seemed upset, but Parker wouldn't drop it. And now he was pissed off too. "You have no ******** right to throw this." He tightened his grip on it and held it up to her face. "No <********> right." Was it pathetic that he carried around a mirror that Dani had left at his house most of the time?

Maybe -- but Parker didn't care about any judgment Tate might give in that moment.

Parker was upset and frustrated, but he wasn't mad at Tate, not really. He never really got mad at her. Just annoyed. It didn't keep the scowl off of his face. "I was just kidding around, Tate. You pull s**t on me all the time, and you know it. You're always ******** with me," he said, shaking his head. She was a rough-housing kind of friend. Parker was accustomed to being playfully pushed on escalators, punched in the arm for sarcastic comments, and abandoned in the middle of the feminine products aisle. She liked to joke around, and that was fine with him.

So why couldn't she handle her own persistent medicine?

When she grabbed him, Parker snatched his wrist back. The mirror was still clutched in his hand, but the reflection was away from Tate now. "I'm already bleeding. What do you want to do -- rip my damn arm off?" He lifted the mirror to look at the damage again, then glanced back to Tate.

"Okay, this is weird. You're being weird. What is your issue with the mirror?"

This wasn't the kind of thing Parker wanted to drop. It was an overreaction that he had never seen before, and he planned on getting to the bottom of it. If something was wrong, Tate needed to tell him. Weren't they friends? Okay, so maybe they weren't big on sharing anything too deep, but ever since he had been fighting with Dani, they'd been getting better about it.

Now this was one of those times.