Chapter Text
Sebastian lived in the valley. He lived here, at the back of her brand-new achingly old house, and his mother was a lovely lady with beautiful auburn hair.
Why hadn’t he mentioned the name of the place where he lived back when they had been friendly? Why hadn’t Saoirse mentioned where her grandfather had lived, or even just his name? This whole situation could have been avoided had they ever stopped and taken a second, in the past, to actually speak to each other.
Would she not have come out here if she had known? It scared her a little to think she might not have. But the decision had been a whim of hers and sometimes all a whim needed to be burst was one tiny prick in the side.
Sebastian was dashing all her plans. Or he wasn’t and she was being dramatic.
Saoirse sighed and climbed from her bed to switch on the one lamp in her room. It hummed as it lit up the room. She had lain there for too long, had let the world grow dark over her body.
And then, she realized she was entirely too tired to do anything that necessitated the light. She pulled off her clothes, switched the lamp back off and climbed under the suspiciously cool covers. At least when she was asleep she would not be able to think.
And not think Saoirse did. At least until her alarm went off.
She did not want to get out of bed. But the brisk cold wind of an early spring morning woke her quickly enough. You see, it got through the walls of her drafty little farmhouse.
Teeth set, she pulled clothes on at random. She saw to the chickens, collected their eggs, let them mill around her legs for a moment while she rolled her shoulders. She watered the parsnips too and did her level-best not to feel silly about it.
Then she set off for the town again to try to catch Abigail. She thought that it would be rude to simply not show up to the Saloon on the Friday when she had been invited. But it’s not like she could go now. The friend of hers that she had mentioned was definitely Sebastian. He wasn’t going to appreciate it if she started encroaching on his personal relationships.
Like many people have across the world for the history of all of time, she wished that things were different. It would have been nice to have a friend who lived in the valley before she moved. But Sebastian had very clearly marked himself as someone with no affection for Saoirse when he had dropped out without a word to her or any other friends that they shared. One day he was there, the next he had packed up and left. His room-mate, a polarizing guy named Quentin who Saoirse mostly remained friends with out of a small amount of pity and the years shared between them now, claimed to not have noticed Sebastian’s preparations to leave at all.
For a while, Saoirse had been angry at him. She wished he had noticed before so that she could have talked to Sebastian, asked him to stay, asked how she could support him. Because she knew she was at least 80% accurate in thinking that he had dropped out because of personal struggles. He had opened up to her once or twice during their time in college. Something about a stepfather who was ambivalent towards him, a younger sister that was the golden child. Saoirse could only imagine the havoc that could wreak on a person’s mental state, the resilience it would chip away from them. And she knew not to express pity for him because she couldn’t imagine anything that would curl his mouth into a sneer faster, but she could have talked through the options with him, seen if dropping out really had been the only option.
Maybe she was assuming too much though. Maybe she put too much stock into getting a degree. Sure, look at where she was now: not using her degree in a hard sense, because she had decided to become a farmer. She had little doubt that the soft skills she had acquired and the knowledge that she had retained would come in useful for the endeavor but she wasn’t using her degree in the classical sense. Maybe they had both failed, with the only difference being that she had done it a little later on.
Saoirse winced. She often did that when her own thoughts took self-deprecating turns. She wasn’t being kind to herself and she knew she needed to be kind to herself if she wasn’t going to turn tail and run back home with tears in her eyes.
She could cry all she wanted she had promised herself. She just had to do it here in the valley.
But not right now when she had to talk to Abigail. She may as well buy some more seeds while she was at it. Really lean into the whole farming thing.
Abigail was rearranging stock on a shelf when Saoirse walked in. Her purple hair was pulled back from her face with a thick black clip. Saoirse wondered how she got the purple so vibrant, if it was freshly done because absolutely no root was showing. Her own hair grew so quickly that it was often she only got a few days of freshly bleached hair before her true brunette hair was showing.
She smiled at her father behind the counter and introduced herself. He seemed on a surface-level nice enough, if only because he was so sales-oriented. The price of the cauliflower seeds she was buying seemed a little steep but she had never really bought seeds before so how was she meant to know? Pierre, as he had called himself, bagged them for her and told her to come back if she ever needed any essentials. Saoirse thanked him and turned around to talk to Abigail only to take a step forward right into her.
She had stopped what she was doing to turn towards Saoirse, was now staring at her. They were a little too close, sharing each other’s space a little too much.
“You kind of look like a friend of mine,” Saoirse said, mainly because her mind had gone mostly blank.
“Alice?” Abigail said.
Saoirse blinked. So Sebastian had noticed it too. “Yeah,” she said. “Alice.”
Abigail cocked her head a little to the side. She had large eyes. She was a pretty girl which made sense. Alice was too. “Sebastian mentioned her,” she said.
Saoirse swallowed. “About Friday…” she said.
“Don’t say you can’t come,” Abigail said.
Saoirse’s mouth felt dry. She glanced between Abigail and back over her shoulder to Pierre who was talking with Lewis now. “I can’t,” she said. “Sebastian is going to be there, right? We haven’t seen each other in nearly three years and I think he’s freaked out I’m in the valley at all.”
“Who gives a fuck about him?”
“Abigail!” Pierre said. “Language.”
“Sorry Dad,” Abigail said as a flat courtesy. She spoke to Saoirse again. “But I’m being serious. Sebastian and Sam usually just play pool anyway and I hate pool. Come to the Saloon with me. Please?”
“I’ve got a lot of work to do on the farm…”
“Yoba above, what did you two do to each other? Was it something messy? Did someone fall in love? Who broke the other’s heart?”
“Nobody broke anybody’s heart,” Saoirse said quickly. “Nothing like that.”
“Well, you have to tell me,” Abigail insisted. “In the Saloon. On Friday. I’m being serious. I won’t take no for an answer.”
“I don’t think that’s something you’re allowed to do.”
“You don’t 'think’ which means you’re not sure. Friday at 6. See you then.”
***
Against all odds, Saoirse found herself at the Saloon on the Friday.
Without giving herself time to think, she went through the doors. Lewis was who she encountered first, talking to Marnie who Saoirse had met earlier in the week. She waved at the two of them. Marnie waved back with a warm smile but Lewis was decidedly more reserved. He half-pretended not to see her.
Strange of him.
The owner of the saloon welcomed her as he cleaned a glass. Behind him, a woman with blue hair had her back to Saoirse. She was on her tiptoes, which to be fair to her, got her to near the top-shelf where she precariously pulled out a glass. Saoirse was apprehensive about the outcome of this movement, caught watching to see if the glass would fall as she the barmaid slipped it over the shelf that she was startled when Abigail grabbed her right hand.
“Hey,” she said. “We’re through here.”
Saoirse breathed out, nodded. “Okay,” she said, not so much following as she was being dragged.
They went to the side-room of the main part of the Saloon. It held a handful of arcade machines, if one had big enough palms to hold a couple of arcade machines, a vending machine emblazoned with the Joja colours, a shiny couch in the corner, a few worn stools and a pool-table.
He didn’t see her right away. He was too busy lining up his shot. A blond guy stood opposite him, scratching at the back of his neck in a sheepish manner.
Sebastian had always been good at bar games. Saoirse had bet him at darts exactly once and she still thought that was due to pure luck. One round t her out of maybe thirty. He just had an eye for it.
It was the same with pool in the valley, she saw. His opponent was losing terribly. Or, well, he was, until Sebastian looked up, saw her, accidentally took his shot without looking and sank the cue ball.
“Great work, Seb,” Abigail said sarcastically giving him a little wave as she lead Saoirse over to the couch.
Saoirse ducked her eyes and didn’t look at him. She felt she should not be here. She even felt it was a little pushy of her to be encroaching on his personal space, his local haunts. But she had just moved here. Surely they were now her local areas too? Even if they were not yet elevated to the status of ‘haunts.’
Sebastian simply stood there for a moment, the pool-stick still grasped loosely between his fingers. Slowly, he set it down on the edge of the table. Then, he moved closer to the couch.
Saoirse thought he was going to say something. He made eye-contact, and though his mouth was set hard for a moment he did open it as if to speak. But instead her just grabbed his jacket from the stool by the couch and left.
Abigail rolled her eyes. Their other friend looked after him quizzically. But they did not follow him.
“Should you go see if he’s okay?” Saoirse asked.
“He wouldn’t like that,” Abigail said. “I’ll text him later. Sam can go over in the morning. Sam, this is Saoirse.”
“Oh!” the blond said. “That explains it. It’s good to meet you.”
Saoirse raised an eyebrow. “Is it?”
“Well did you do something unforgivable to Sebastian?”
“I mean it when I say I don’t think I did anything at all.”
“Well then yeah, it’s good to meet you. I don’t know, I believe you when you say you didn’t do anything. He doesn’t really talk about his time in Zuzu, though. The first time he did was today before you came.”
Saoirse really wished she had a drink in her hand. “What did he say?”
“That he was halfway through paying Robin back the tuition fees. That he was glad he had left.”
“Has he always been like this?” Saoirse asked. “Cagey? Quiet?”
Sam leaned back on the couch, threw his arms over the back. “Yeah,” he said. “Seb just likes to keep to himself. He’s a good guy, just got his own stuff going on. And he doesn’t like to talk about that stuff.”
“He’s a bit closed off with everyone,” Abigail continued. “Even us. And we’ve known him for years. But he was as excited as someone as low-key as him could be when he first got the acceptance. I don’t know; maybe it just wasn’t everything he needed it to be.”
Sebastian had been good at college. The sort of natural smarts that made Saoirse and nearly everybody else jealous. For him, it had seemed so easy. All of it. But she supposed academics weren’t the be-all and end-all of life.
But that’s the thing; socially he had not been doing poorly either. Their little group hadn’t been perfect but she had thought they were friends. It just wasn’t fair.
Suddenly, she was angry. Who did he think he was? To leave a room as soon as she walked in? To act as if she had committed some unspeakable act? He was the one who had left. He, in a way, was the one who was in the wrong.
But he also wasn’t in the room right now. There was no point hovering around him as a point of conversation, was there? Here she was with two new people who were being exceptionally open towards being her friend and she was stuck on some guy who could not bear to give her the time of day. She had to pick herself up, to not let this hurdle on the track up-end her chance of forming new connections
“Tell me about yourself,” she said abruptly, with her brow furrowed.
Abigail blinked and then gave a laugh.
“Alright then,” she said. “Why don’t we get some drinks first?”