Guidance Counselor's Office, Wednesday

[electrocynic]

Electroclash was predictably cranky.

The good thing was that the radio had stopped playing Christmas carols.

The bad thing was that it was now playing an endless torrent of barely-appropriate pop and overly syrupy love songs, and she did not much care for either right now.

Fandom High's guidance counselor was in. And slumped in her chair behind her desk, looking grumpy. But in.

[ooc: Open!]

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[electrocynic]

Electroclash rested her elbows against the desk with a sigh.

"But there are some," she pointed out. "We ought to ask them how they do it." A beat. "Then maybe point and laugh at them."

[myownface]

"Seriously," Sparkle muttered. "What the hell are they doing wasting their time around here if they actually have their shit together, anyway?"

Sparkle would kick all of them in the shins, but some of them were biters.

[electrocynic]

Elctroclash would fry their electronics. It usually took people longer to notice that.

"Could be that that's their major flaw? Settling for this."

[myownface]

"Oh, god, that could be it," Sparkle replied, blinking. "Like, everyone who's ever talked up the island who seems like they know which way is up? Oh, oh shit. Now I feel better about myself."

Marginally! That was a start!

[electrocynic]

She was going to take credit for that, thank you very much.

"See? They don't really know what they're doing, either. At least we're aware of that shit."

[myownface]

"Score one for team Self-Awareness," Sparkle mused, shaking his head. "Now if I could just figure out where the hell I want to be in like four months, and I'll be all set."

A beat.

"God, I shouldn't have put like a countdown on it. Now it's worse."

[electrocynic]

"So, retract it," Electroclash shrugged. "They're not going to boot you off the island at the end of the summer, you know. In all likelihood you'll have your shit together enough by then to know where the fuck you're going next, at least, but it's not a hard deadline."

[myownface]

"Yeah, I guess it's not," Sparkle agreed, though he was still giving a thoughtful frown. "I don't want to burn bridges either though, you know? I'm eighteen, like, it shouldn't be a big deal, but back home I'm not yet, and I still have a youth record back there. So I go back, and it's all... parole officers and group homes and that bullshit."

But it was also Lewis. For Lewis, Sparkle would deal with all kinds of crap.

"And then at eighteen, so long as I don't piss off somewhere and I keep in touch with my parole officer and I'm not doing shit I can be tried as an adult for, it's a blank slate."

It was weird how scary 'blank slate' was, as a concept."

[electrocynic]

"Isn't that a good thing?"

For her, it would have been, so she had to ask.

[myownface]

"Of course it's a good thing," Sparkle replied with a shrug, "but they're not going to want to give me a clean slate if I take off and breach parole and don't go back and stick it out until I'm eighteen the way I'm supposed to. Lewis had to pull a shitload of strings to get me into boarding school out of the country in the first place."

He frowned a little at the radio, because the radio seemed like a productive direction to point his dirty look, if nothing else.

"So if I want that, I kind of do have to leave here, you know? I breach my terms and I'm never going back. That's not the kind of trouble I want to be in again."

[electrocynic]

"Ah." That made a lot more sense. "Well, it's still a long time to figure shit out," she said, shrugging. "Fandom'll have time to show you about twenty potential futures before you escape its clutches."

[myownface]

"Yeah, I've seen one or two of those already," Sparkle muttered, resting his chin on his arms. "There was this twenty-year high school reunion thing once, and, go me, I was trying to get integrated back into society after serving ten years in prison."

Sparkle was super on board with not living that one out, thanks.

[electrocynic]

"I didn't say they were going to be ones you should actually work towards," she pointed out. "Figuring out shit you don't want to do is equally important. Would've saved me from some bad choices."

[myownface]

"I don't want to spend ten years in the big house," Sparkle replied, raising an eyebrow. "Like, on the list of life goals I have set out in front of me, 'prison' doesn't even rank."

So, that was a start?

"And it, like, I don't know. Sort of occurred to me that it would suck to leave, like... people. Behind. But group home kids don't exactly go down in history as the world's best-travelled. So... I would be."

[electrocynic]

"You're not some 'group home kid'," Electroclash scoffed. "You're Sparkle, for fuck's sake. You can do what you like."

After the terms and conditions of certain law-related agreements had been fulfilled, obviously.

"Look, I don't know what you should do. But I do know you have a lot of fucking potential." Because to her, attitude was key. "And if you don't want to leave people behind, don't leave people behind."

Spoken like someone who was still pining for someone who'd left for outer space.

[myownface]

"... It's that easy?"

That was said with the sort of tentative hope of a kid for whom it had never been 'that easy,' who was really, really ready for it to maybe start being, for once.

[electrocynic]

"Yes, if you're willing to decide it should be," she told him. "For fuck's sake, you're from Fandom. We go across dimensional borders for holidays and we get attacked by God knows what almost every semester. There should be nothing standing in your way in any direction after you've survived this hellhole."

[myownface]

"I guess." Sparkle didn't sound super convinced, really, but he was willing to go with the flow, today. It had been a long week. Listening to something resembling optimism from Electroclash of all people was kind of a nice change of pace. "Like, even if I just go back long enough to take care of the record thing, and then think about coming back or whatever, maybe that would work. I mean. Maybe... not back here. Here still sucks. But somewhere easier. There's a whole multiverse, right?"

This was possibly one of the more sound trains of thought Sparkle had explored on the matter since he'd come to the island in the first place.

[electrocynic]

"There's an entire fucking multiverse," Electroclash agreed. "It doesn't have to go like Fandom's been some tiny visit outside of where you're from, and afterwards you're stuck in your original world. No."

[myownface]

"It's weird," Sparkle decided. "Like, literally having the whole fucking universe out there and then some. I have to stop and recalibrate, because everything until I came here was pointing to me being stuck in Toronto forever. It's just, like, I want to wait until my record's clear. I want to leave that place on good terms, because if the rest of the universe doesn't work out, at least that way there'll still be Toronto."

[electrocynic]

"There's the logic you should keep in mind," Electroclash said, approvingly. Even if in the middle of that she glared sharply at the radio, because Ginuwine, seriously? "Toronto doesn't have to be forever, and everywhere but Toronto doesn't have to be forever. Waiting for your record to clear sucks, maybe, but it's a relatively short time."

[myownface]

"Yeah, I guess. Like a few months. Maybe a year, I don't know. I don't even know what month it is back home right now. Kind of afraid to look." He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "But what's another year, I guess? It'll give me more time to figure out if I even want to be in Toronto."

He was starting to wonder.

"It can't possibly feel the same being back there after being in this screwed-up place so long."

[electrocynic]

"Nah, Fandom does that to you," Electroclash agreed, leaning back in her chair. "Gets you to take the most bonkers shit as normal. Weird to go out to places that are just... mundane."

And her mundane had capes and supervillains.

[myownface]

The corner of Sparkle's mouth twitched a little. God, he hated that word.

"See, and here I used to think that the hard part was not falling into old habits again, or maybe hiding the whole thing about how I sometimes have girl parts or turn into a tiny unicorn or a little kid from people who would freak out about it. And now I don't even know what to expect. Like... it's just going to feel wrong."

[electrocynic]

Electroclash shrugged.

"That's when you have to be brave, I s'pose."