Revenge of the Mutant Pansies (Open)

[Wren O'Hara]

Wren was good at a lot of things, but visual art wasn’t necessarily among them. Despite this, he was tucked into a corner of the art studio, as he often was on a weekend afternoon. Currently, he was hunched with his nose precious few inches from a large sheet of watercolor paper. He held a paint-loaded brush carefully between his fingers, his face a mask of intense concentration; beside him, there was a glass of water that was the particularly unappealing color one receives when one mixes purple and dark green.

The room was relatively quiet, because clubs didn’t generally meet on the weekends and most of the other students relished the opportunity to have free reign of the small town of Pilot Ridge. Wren, however, had an adventurer’s heart, and often used the free time to try something he was likely to be miserable at. Indeed, watercolor painting was not his strong suit. But he liked it, and, as with other things, his enjoyment was more important to him than any subjective sense of talent.

So, he continued cautiously dipping his brush into the paint and back onto the paper, scratching lightly at the textured surface with practiced care. In the thirty minutes he’d been at it, he’d managed to portray what was clearly a flower, although it wasn’t any flower that one might recognize. In other words, he’d made it up; it had six oddly-shaped pin-like leaves and five purple petals, but the edge of one had gotten a bit of green paint on and dried that way.

Undeterred by his apparent failure, Wren painted on, brows furrowed under his baseball cap. Perhaps he would add more flowers, he thought idly, or a tree, or a pond somewhere in the background…

[Deleted]

Weekend. Perfect.

A certain student stalked and moseyed himself down a certain hallway trying to not look like he was moseying on to a certain classroom so he could actually practice a certain power without certain people watching. And by certain people, Oriel meant everyone who had a beating heart.

The last time he's risked his dignity, it had been met with colossal failure, a broken fake dish, a bloody nose, and a clotted loogie at the foot of one certain teacher/not-teacher who had the nerve to disturb his practice. Well, no such thing was going to happen today! Oriel happened to know very well that on this day at this hour, the art studio had a very low chance of being occupied by anyone, much less that certain teacher/not-teacher.

Oriel looked to the leeeeeft. And looked to the riiiiight. The halls were empty. Good.

He turned the knob and quickly entered, closing it just as quickly behind him and hoping that nobody out there saw. After all, his dignity was at stake.

"Oh, hell..." he moaned as he rolled his eyes, realizing that, chances of chances, there was somebody else already in here. And a goody-good nerd, by the looks of it.

[Wren O'Hara]

Wren had only just finished a second mutant pansy and was busy carefully squeezing some glitter-blue paint into his mixing tray when the door to the room opened and shut in very quick succession. He wasn’t startled – he was very rarely startled – but he was curious, and he looked up at the newcomer blankly, paint bottle still held awkwardly in his hand.

The other guy looked vaguely familiar, and if Wren concentrated, he could sort of guess at his name, even. Ariel? No, definitely not. Ollie? No. He didn’t really look like an Ollie. Whatever his name was, he didn’t look happy to see Wren, which Wren was beginning to consider one of those Hammel things. No matter where you were in the school, someone, somewhere, was going to be unhappy to see you.

Several beats of silence passed. Hazel-green blinked awkwardly at walnut-brown.

“Hey,” he said finally. His eyebrows were slightly raised under his Yankees cap in an attempt to appear as non-threatening as possible. He put the glitter-blue paint he’d been holding back on the table before cleaning his brush; the room was momentarily filled with the sound of wood against glass.

He went back to his painting, smushing the blue paint around with his clean brush and dabbing at his paper again. He was really going for pond, but if he was honest, it looked more like a lumpy blue potato between two weird, floating flowers.

He didn’t care really care, though.

“Did you need the watercolors or something?” he asked without looking up. “I need the blue, but you can have the others.”

[Deleted]

Oriel stared at the kid who looked like his head belonged in a toilet somewhere with eyes that had nowhere near the amount of hostility he'd intended them to have. Or maybe Oriel was just playing at being annoyed, who the fuck knew?

If Oriel were smart, he would have just left right then and there and try his luck another day(which would be ages from now, since that is likely how long it would take him to work up the nerve to step foot in this place again). But unfortunately, Oriel was stupid and pushed himself off from the door, stalking further inside the studio with a "don't mess with me" scowl on his face in response to the dweeb's "hey."

Did he know this guy? Did this kid think they were friends somehow? Well, now that he looked closer, he might have had a class with this kid…maybe...not that Oriel would remember as he slept through most of them.

He was silent as the kid washed his brush, strolling along the walls of the studio, inspecting the works of the other students. Though by the time Nancy spoke again, Oriel was squatting on a desk behind him, watching him paint…a potato?

Oriel rolled his eyes. "Really, what about me, this face here, screams to you "oh my god, an artist!"." He waved his hands around like a sissy, speaking in a mocking falsetto, then stopped suddenly as he glared at the back of Nancy's head. "Do I look like a fucking Picasso to you?"

And this was Oriel trying to be nice.

[Wren O'Hara]

Wren’s greeting went unanswered, which was fine; if the other boy didn’t feel like making small talk, he wasn’t going to push his luck. He turned his nose back to his painting as his unhappy companion’s footsteps circled the room.

It was only when he heard the short scrape of a desk and felt the lingering shadow of someone looking over his shoulder that he tilted his head very slightly to the side, so that he could look back with his peripheral vision.

A drop of watered-down paint fell from his brush and landed on the petal of one of his flowers, staining the dried purple with blue, but he didn’t really mind.

The other boy’s blatantly hostile question didn’t really startle him, although it did test his patience just a little. Wren turned back to his painting again and released a quick puff of air from his cheeks.

“Dunno,” he replied noncommittally, cleaning his brush again. “The fact that your face is in the art studio, I guess.”

He paused, swirling the stiff-with-paint brush head around in the dab of green paint on his mixing tray. He put a few sprigs of grass around his potato-pond. With his other hand, he grabbed a piece of watercolor paper from the stack beside him and slid it in front of the seat to his left.

“I’m not an artist either,” he murmured. “I just paint on weekends.”

[Deleted]

What the hell was small talk anyway? Just useless talk to fill the dead air with? Not Oriel's style, he wasn't about to ask about the quality of someone's past five minutes or hour of their life just for the sake of making small talk! Because they sure as hell didn't care about any of that stuff when it came to an asshole like Oriel.

Not that this guy had done any of that.

"What rule says you have to be an artist to come into an art studio?" Seriously, society had some weird ideas of what was Ok and what wasn't. Like, if you ate breakfast, you had to have sausage, bacon, eggs, muffins, pancakes, or cereal for some reason. What if I wanted pizza? Or nachos? Not that Oriel ate nachos, but that wasn't the point. The point was, society was stupid and they brainwashed people into making stupid associations.

Oriel, of course, had better things to do than to sit behind this dweeb who thought that art rooms were only for artists and weekend painters. Like napping! Yeah, Oriel should just go take a nap instead of sitting around with this silent boring classist with the blank stare. "The fuck you trying to paint anyway?" Not that he was interested, nope, not him!

[Wren O'Hara]

Wren pondered this question seriously, as though it had been an assignment; he ran down the list in his mind of possible reasons one might come to the art studio but not want to do art or be an artist.

Taking his relaxed, creative upbringing into account, and trying to compensate at least a little for the average degree of Hammel weirdness, it was still a pretty short list.

“If you came here to smoke, I’m not going to tell anybody,” he said, after a moment. The art studio had very good ventilation, for obvious reasons, and the large single-paned windows faced the back yard of the campus, where teachers were less likely to see. “Just keep by the window.”

The other boy didn’t move. Instead, he kept talking, and Wren finally rested his brush on the edge of his mixing tray and twisted around in his chair to survey him.

“It’s a pond,” he said without a trace of embarrassment. “With grass. And flowers,” he supplied, as though his intent with the flowers hadn’t been immediately obvious.

I’ll probably add a sun next, he added silently to himself.

A beat passed between them.

“So…” he trailed off expectantly, fixing the dark-haired boy with his hazel-green stare. Wren would have normally asked him if he was going to have a seat, but he thought better; he figured it would probably just earn him a snarky reply.

[Deleted]

Oriel furrowed two creases between his eyebrows. "What, you think that just 'cause I didn't come here to do "art" that I'm just here to cause trouble?" Oriel rolled his eyes. "Man, you sure are judgmental, making assumptions like you know everything."

And, of course, Oriel here was being a real Mother Teresa.

Though honestly, he was offended that anyone would assume he was a smoker just because he was a "little rough" around the edges. Not that he hadn't tried it before, but he just didn't have a taste for it and only smoked when his friends had some extra to bum. Not that he had any friends who smoked here at Hammel.

"You mean it's not a potato?" A blue potato with a couple of weirdly colored sprouts on it. Though if he squinted, it miiiight look like a pond. Like how it'd look if he had really bad eyesight. "Huh…" Oriel grunted as he narrowed his eyes.

The dweeb was looking at him. Why was he looking at him? Oriel was being friendly enough, right? Couldn't he just go back to working on his potato pond and pretend that Oriel wasn't here? Though if Oriel bothered him enough, maybe the kid would realize it wasn't worth it and just leave so Oriel could practice his power in peace and quiet.

"What…?" he raised an eyebrow to accompany his own confused scowl.

[Wren O'Hara]

Wren could feel the top layer of his patience slowly ebbing away. It was unusual, but he couldn’t seem to help it. It was like talking to a particularly belligerent wall.

Whatever. Whatever the other guy was doing in the art studio, he reasoned, it wasn’t his business. If he wanted to sit there and watch Wren paint poorly, that wasn’t his business. He would just ignore him until he was done painting, or until the other boy went away.

Right? Wren knew that it was what he ought to do.

For some reason, though, he already knew that he wasn’t going to be able to do it. There was tension in the room that hadn’t been there before, and it was bothering him. He couldn’t get into his zen watercolor mood like this.

“So,” Wren continued, flatly. “You came here to play twenty questions with strangers?”

He studied the dark-featured boy with heavy-lidded eyes for a moment before turning around again.

Seriously.

“Anyway, if you’re waiting for me to leave, I’m going to be a while. I’m going to put a sun in the corner of this one, and then I’m going to start another. So you can sit somewhere,” he said, motioning vaguely with one hand to the cluster of empty seats beside of them. “Or you can come back later. I’d appreciate it if you stopped staring over my shoulder, though. It’s throwing me off. No offense.”

It was the most Wren had said at once all day – probably all week, really. The effort wore him out. He cleared his throat.

“I’m Wren, by the way,” he added in a less serious tone, by way of peace offering.

[Deleted]

No, Oriel did not just come here to watch this dim-witted kid paint a potato, why would he find that interesting anyway? Nope, Oriel sure didn't!

But this kid was starting to grind on Oriel a little bit, or a lotta bit, but not necessarily the kind of grinding that Oriel particularly enjoyed. Especially since it seemed like this kid had the nerve to think that Oriel was the one being rude. "Well, you know, maybe if you stop making assumptions like it's your holy right as an entitled prick, you wouldn't have to ask twenty questions. But I sure as hell don't offer that kind of information to somebody who obviously don't care enough to know it and just ask me straight up." That was, hands down, one of Oriel's biggest pet-peeves(and a hypocritical one at that), when people just automatically made assumptions about who Oriel was without even bothering to ask.

Oriel just grunted in response to the other kid's continued assumptions. Not that those ones were wrong, but he wasn't going to tell him that. It was the principle of the thing! Or something...

He slid off the desk without another word and refocused his attentions to the other artsy projects on the wall. The stippled bowl he had broken months before had already been taken down. Ok, yeah. Oriel felt pretty bad about that. Because obviously that shit looked like it was hard to do, it wasn't anything that Oriel could ever hope to accomplish, and might have actually meant something to the...creator? Artist? Student?

Whatever.

"Wren," he started after a long bout of silence. Thank god the creep gave out his name, now Oriel didn't have to make one up for him, 'cause he sure as hell wasn't about to ask(do you see the hypocrisy here?). "You got anything on this wall?"

[Wren O'Hara]

Wren blinked. To date, he didn’t think he’d ever been called an entitled prick by anyone, and it gave him a moment of introspection. Had he really said something wrong? When someone entered a room and proceeded to glare at you, didn’t they have some sort of obligation to explain why they were glaring at you?

Wren thought so, but now he wasn’t entirely sure.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, dipping his brush listlessly into the sunshine-yellow paint. He dragged the brush across the corner of the paper, creating a large half-circle in the corner of the paper and filling it in meticulously.

As an afterthought, he drew a few streaks under the orb, to indicate rays of sunlight. He admired his work for a moment.

“So, what did you come in here for?” he asked, mostly undeterred. He’d said that he’d wanted to be asked straight up, right?

Wren had been drawing a pair of sunglasses on the yellow orb in the corner of his paper with a black permanent marker when the other boy said his name. He looked up, looked at the art along the wall, then looked back down at his project.

“Yeah,” Wren said, after a moment. He put the cap back onto the permanent marker and used his free hand to point to a medium-sized watercolor painting that had been hidden tactfully next to the filing cabinet, where it was the least likely to be offensive to anyone’s delicate aesthetic sensibilities. It was a small house made of brown stone; it had a red clay roof, flowering bushes along its side (they looked a little like potatoes, too, if any potato had ever been green with purple spots). Behind it was a vast horizon of blue that was supposed to be water, although the paint had bled into other things and ruined any suggestion of depth.

“Do you?” he asked.

[Deleted]

Nope, Oriel felt no obligation to tell anyone anything about himself that wasn't in response to a direct question. Why the fuck should he? They were his thoughts and opinions and if anyone really cared to know what they were they they would ask right?

Oriel only grunted at the apology and continued on his way, turning his head over every so often to get a glimpse of the emerging "masterpiece" that this geek was trying to create….it wasn't that great, but it was a heck of a lot better than anything Oriel could produce.

"Practice," he replied both concisely and vaguely, stuffing his hands into his pockets and rolling his shoulders back like a bad-ass.

Oriel shifted his eyes to the pointed finger, then followed it to the indicated painting on the wall next to the filing cabinet, which was yet another equally brilliant "masterpiece" of a house and potato bushes. Still…it was better than anything Oriel could conjure up. "Hmm…" He wondered if he should at least try to do something….nope. Couldn't do it. Nope nope nope….

"Nope…Told you, I ain't an artist."

[Wren O'Hara]

“Practice what?” Wren asked without looking up from his painting. He had relaxed a little, feeling as though conversing with this person had a bit of a learning curve and he was finally getting the hang of it.

He finished with his first painting, plopping his brush into the now-swampy glass of water and pushing the paper to the side to dry. He reached over, then, grabbed the blank piece of paper he had set out earlier, and slid it onto his desk.

Wren reached for the still-open bottle of glitter blue liquid paint and dabbed a little more onto his mixing tray. With his clean brush, he smooshed it together with the nearby red, creating a deep, sparkling purple.

Satisfied, he went to work again.

“Okay. Well, what are you, then?” he asked, calmly. Now that the other boy had indicated his preference for direct questions, Wren was really going for the big money. He blinked innocently under his baseball cap.

[Deleted]

“Practice what?”

Noow, he was getting it. If he wanted to know anything, he was going to have to fish for it. Yup, this was a great new way to bug someone, wonder why he hadn't thought of it before.

Though still, this was probably the nicest Oriel had been to someone on the first meeting in a long time. "Power," he said, not giving him anything else.

This was pretty fun. Oriel had to hold back a small smirk.

Oriel turned his attentions back to Wren and what he was doing. No, he wasn't interested in knowing how he was making his colors and how he figured out what he was going to make on the paper… no he was not…

Anyway…

Oriel hopped back up on the desk, squatting on his haunches and leaning his chin in his palm. "An asshole." Followed by a grin born straight from hell.

[Wren O'Hara]

So he’d come here to practice his power, Wren thought to himself as he drew the brush along the paper. The purple line he’d been working on was taking on the vague shape of a vase (or a really ugly fish). Once he’d finished with the outline, he began filling it in with the same color.

“Oh? What’s your power?” Wren asked. “I turn invisible in water.”

The other boy hadn’t asked, but Wren had told him anyway, just because; he wasn’t sure if he was trying to be friendly or inflammatory at this point. After a few moments of slathering purple onto his paper, he reached into the school bag propped against the legs of his chair and fished out a brownie-flavored power bar.

He unwrapped it slowly before securing his mouth around the first half. The dark-eyed boy spoke, and Wren eyed him for a while, unflinching. An asshole, eh? Well, honesty was a virtue.

“Part-time or full-time?” he asked, mouth full of brownie.