He laughs, though it isn't all that easy of a laugh. Keeping this entirely focused on their friend helps, but it's still a bit uncomfortable. They never talk about this sort of thing.
"I have a feeling it'll take more than a couple of months for him to get comfortable with the idea."
After all, back home, Billy's a teenager again. Even if he remembers, and maybe he doesn't, when he's there. Age is a strange sort of distance that creeps up on you. Neil is, perhaps, twenty or twenty-one or seventy, depending on how one does the math; old enough that in the real world, if he'd lived, marriage wouldn't be such an impossible idea. Maybe there could have been a world where they'd wait patiently and choose to walk down the aisle as old men. Or maybe (and maybe likelier) they'd both have wives and children because that was what one ought to do.
But it strikes him, in a way it never has-- not that he'd ever doubted them, outside a stray, miserable curse-- that here, as they are, they might as well be married. What a way to look at it.
☞ fold into the dent of my chest, the crook of my shoulder || backdated to early November-ish
"I have a feeling it'll take more than a couple of months for him to get comfortable with the idea."
After all, back home, Billy's a teenager again. Even if he remembers, and maybe he doesn't, when he's there. Age is a strange sort of distance that creeps up on you. Neil is, perhaps, twenty or twenty-one or seventy, depending on how one does the math; old enough that in the real world, if he'd lived, marriage wouldn't be such an impossible idea. Maybe there could have been a world where they'd wait patiently and choose to walk down the aisle as old men. Or maybe (and maybe likelier) they'd both have wives and children because that was what one ought to do.
But it strikes him, in a way it never has-- not that he'd ever doubted them, outside a stray, miserable curse-- that here, as they are, they might as well be married. What a way to look at it.