astheocean | (no subject)

Just four weeks to go until she can finally move out of the stupid fucking Children's Home, and Jules is all but losing her mind with anticipation. Granted, there's a lot to do in that time, too, and it is a little daunting to be about to live on her own for the first time, but all of that pales in comparison to the relief she feels at being so close to not living in an orphanage with a bunch of children, when she hasn't felt like one in a long time, when it's sometimes too painfully reminiscent of parts of her past she would rather not dwell on.

Today, she meant to be out buying things for the apartment she'll be moving into soon, a small collection of necessities beginning to accrue in her storage locker at the Home. She can't help it if she gets sidetracked, though, when she walks past an art supply store, quickly deciding that a little detour is in order. Until she actually has more space, she can't really go overboard, and she probably should be watching her spending anyway, but it isn't as if a new sketchbook or set of pencils, or maybe some watercolors or something, are going to bankrupt her. A girl's got to have an outlet, anyway, and knowing she'll be moving out soon has her feeling all the more stifled in the meantime.

So far, she's mostly just looking around, anyway, though a basket that she knows she's bound to need hangs from one hand. Rounding a corner of one aisle, she smiles when she spots a familiar face. "Hey, Will," she says, making her way over to him. "What're you looking at?"

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"Hey, Jules," Will said with an easy smile, holding up a pack of brush-tipped watercolor markers.

"I don't even know where to start. When we moved out to California, the only good thing about it was the big art supply store in town, and they didn't even half half of this stuff. Have you used these?"

"Not that brand, but I had a set like them back home," Jules says, nodding as she looks at the pack he's holding up. "They're pretty cool." It's one of those things she doesn't think about very much. She knows there are a hell of a lot of ways in which she's lucky to have lived in the time and place she did. The availability of different art supplies, though, never really occurred to her as one of them.

"I say get 'em."

"Yeah, I think I will," Will agreed with a widening smile. "It'll be fun to try something other than acrylic paint and colored pencils."

Not that those weren't both great. He still got excited over a box of Crayola crayons. Art was art.

"What are you up to? I mean, you know, other than..." He gestured to her basket.

"Other than this, I'm technically buying things for a place where I don't live yet," Jules replies, smiling in response to Will's. "It's my birthday in a few weeks, and I finally get to move out of Darrow's Home for Dickensian Orphans, or whatever, and I want to be as ready as possible."

She doesn't want to spend a single second longer there than she has to. Already it's felt interminable. There's nothing she can do about that now, though, so she shrugs, gesturing toward her basket. "Wanna come with me after we get our stuff? I could use another set of eyes."

"Oh, wow. That's awesome. You're getting a place on your own?" Will asked, thinking about how cool and also how terrifying that would be. He couldn't imagine at least being roommates with one of his friends, and even that, he wasn't quite ready for.

"Yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't know if I'm any good at that kind of thing, but, I. Yeah."

"Cool," Jules says, grinning at him as she starts toward the registers at the front of the store, trusting that he'll follow along. Knowing how into art Will is, she'd be willing to bet that he'll probably be better at it than he thinks, but either way, it's as much about having a little company as anything else. Doing all of this shit on her own is exciting, but it's kind of lonely, too.

"And, yeah, on my own. Kinda daunting, but at least I'll finally have my own room again."

"I slept on my mom's boyfriend's couch for the first few months I was here," Will admitted with an amused wince. "In an apartment with my sister, who doesn't remember being my sister, and his other adopted daughter." Pausing briefly, he was quick to add, "Don't get me wrong, I'm really grateful they're all here, but it was... cramped."

"Oof, yeah, that sounds like a lot of people in one space," Jules agrees, wincing sympathetically. At least, she thinks, they're people it sounds like he likes, not strangers, but that doesn't make the lack of privacy or personal space all that much easier to handle. "Your mom's here now, too, right?"

As awkward as it is having Rue as the only person she knows from home here, Jules thinks that's infinitely preferable to that. As far as she's concerned, if her own mother ever showed up here, it wouldn't be any of her business, and vice versa.

"Yeah. We've got our own place now, which is... weird, without my brother, but nice," Will admitted, realizing how boring and easy his life sounded, when he left out the whole... Hawkins-ness of it all.

Approaching the register, he gestured for her to go first, since she's carrying a much heavier basket than his one measly pack of markers.

"That's good," Jules says as she lays her purchases on the counter, fishing into her purse for the crumpled bills in the bottom of it. "That it's nice, I mean. Not the weird without your brother part." It probably stands to reason that that's what she meant, but even so, she wouldn't want to give the wrong idea, mostly because, for her, it's a totally foreign idea. She misses her dad, but not as much as she misses the freedom she had living with him, and other than that, there's no one from her family she would ever want to see here.

"The only person I have from home here is my ex, and that's a whole different brand of weird."

"Oh, shit," Will said, "That... sucks."

Honestly, he didn't know, never having had an ex himself. Still, he'd witnessed what it was like between Mike and El, when they'd been broken up. Calling it rough would've been an understatement.

"Does he live in the Home, too?"

"No, uh, she moved out a while back," Jules says, not making a show of correcting said ex's gender, just letting the response speak for itself. Given how she and Will met, with his response to that movie poster, she'd be willing to bet that all the openness on that subject here is still something of an adjustment.

"She's been here a long time. Like, a few years longer than me. By the time I showed up, she had a roommate, and a new girlfriend, and a whole life here."