19 <3
Something’s shifting in Royce, Grant knows. The boy of 18 with the piercing eyes who could barely speak is long gone, but even what the boy became - the man with a thousand dreams and plans and hopes - doesn’t seem to want to last. There’s a new intensity to the gaze, something deeper - but fractured, almost, or fracturing.
“They don’t see, they don’t want to see,” Royce says, pressing his fingers together in patterns that Grant can’t follow, his cigarette half-burned in his lips. “They want change, of course they do, but what they want the… change to be, well, they just want change, that’s all, change for its own sake…”
Grant nods, of course, murmurs agreement as he sips his coffee, but he can’t quite look away from Royce. It’s a subtle shift, but he sees the sea-change in Royce coming, the new wave, and he wonders if Royce sees it too.
“There are… patterns,” Royce says, a frantic edge behind the slow cadence of his words. “There’s a, a meaning to it all. I can find it. I can find it.”
“I know you can,” Grant murmurs, and he wonders if he could find Royce’s pattern, if he tried, stop the change.
But instead he simply listens, and nods, and hopes that he’ll still understand whatever Royce becomes.