Not always knowing best [Mihai]

[WESTLEY KIRKLAND]

Wes honestly wished he had a choice in the matter, because the utter terror and discomfort he was being forced to endure was nothing fair. It wasn't even as if he had a chance to scurry off and hide, one of the teachers simply ambushed him in the middle of his grammar class and led the boy off to sit in a private room. They seemed to be expecting someone else by the look of the ways it seemed to be set up, three chairs in a circle with two of them occupied. 

The teacher who had collected him was surely taking her time in finding an explanation, a nail file held delicately between her fingers as she groomed her finger tips. She wasn't one he was very familiar with, looking younger than the other teachers in his mind with her face so heavily done up. His Mum would hate to see Kylie ever dressed like that, he would hate it too, she would look like the farthest thing to her free spirited self. 

"Westley is it?" The teacher finally acknowledged the squirming child with simper that made him uncomfortable, leaning forward slightly to pull a clipboard out of her purse. "Our other guest seems to be a little late, so for the sake of time I'll explain what the purpose of our session today is." Her heel strummed an impatient beat on the floorboards as she adjusted her glasses and stared down her nose at him with her lips curled down in disapproval. 

"Can I go to the loo?"

He gave her a nervous smile, nimble fingers tightly laced in his lap as he swayed from side to side in his seat. He didn't need to go in the slightest, but once he was out the door and free from her supervision the boy would be off in a flash to hide. 

The icy glance that the woman gave him nearly made his heart stop with fright, she seemed to know exactly what he had been planning and without a word she returned to looking through her papers. 

"Now, as one of the school counselors it is my job to make sure that you are adjusting well to the environment we provide for you to grow your gifts." She tapped a nail to the frame of her glasses as she spoke, hardly sparing the student a glance. "But it seems that you have not been getting along with the students in your year, save for your sister. We find that especially at your age it is crucial for you to form bonds with other students, and it only makes things harder as you grow outside of the little cliques." 

She gave the Kiwi a small smile, trying to reassure him or something like that "I understand how these things, I used to be a teenager too you see? And it's the mature thing to do is to listen, we have your best interests at heart."

All Wes was able to manage was his default smile, the one that was the easiest to muster up in situations like this where words seemed to forsake him. He didn't like the direction the teacher was leading this conversation off towards, and so he simply tried his previous strategy again. "I really need to go to the loo..."

The woman ignored his second attempt, returning to her little speech after his interruption. "You keep hiding your power! And it's a wonderful gift that you can do so much good for the world with! So I had realized that you were simply afraid! And then I had an epiphany!"

Her brown eyes were aglow as she recited her little monologue, on the edge of her seat as she explained the specifics of her great plan. "You see, I thought that it would be a wonderful idea to have a support group for people like you, with a gift that overtakes their whole body and soul, and do the same to others! It's exciting isn't it? You both have powers that take your body as a price, and gives to another body as a product! So I brought in an older student, he'll talk about himself and adjusting to student life with powers like yours. Then you can see that there's nothing to fear from other students, and you can live a normal campus life."

Wes didn't look very assured. 

[MIHAI ELIADE]

At 12:00 PM, he'd been told that he had to meet a Ms. Spencer at 3:00. He had class from 1:00 to 2:15, which he dutifully attended despite the fact that it was algebra (and it was exceptionally awful), and by the time that had ended, he was still contemplating whether he should honor that meeting. By his thoughts, he had a couple of reasons for not wanting to go: one, he had no clue who this Spencer was (a new teacher for the younger ones, perhaps?) and two, he also had no clue what this meeting was supposed to be about. They'd told him where and when he was supposed to be, but not why, which was the omission that bothered him most. Usually, any of the teachers he cared to see were quite happy to find him and ask him for a preference for meeting times themselves, and they were likewise quite forthcoming about why they wanted to see him. This Spencer lady, not so much apparently.

He was still in the library with LIMBO running on his laptop when their meeting time hit. He'd done good enough a job procrastinating on deciding whether or not to go that the fact that he had been called in had quite escaped his mind, at least until ten minutes later, when he gathered up his belongings and started back to his room. The route took him past the first floor classrooms, and not until he saw the sign for 103 did the meeting cross his mind again. He almost ducked under the thin window occupying one side of the door--he didn't want to be seen and sequestered, of course--but then he was struck with a small bit of curiosity. Who was Ms. Spencer anyway, and would she still be waiting? What did she want to talk to him about (maybe she'd have a stack of papers with her or something that could give him a clue)? His desire for at least a hint won out, and instead of passing the door by, he risked poking his head over the smallest bit, peeking into room.

His first reaction was a slight bit of indignation that she apparently hasn't just asked for him. There were two occupants in the class: a brown-haired, bespectacled woman who he assumed was Ms. Spencer, and then a much younger and much more familiar face--Wes. The details were enough, and he quickly ducked back out of sight before either of them happened to look over and see him. What was Wes doing there? There had been a third chair (empty) in the room, so they must have been expecting someone else--him, most likely. Mihai wracked his brain for any reason a teacher could want to see both of them at once--as far as he remembered, neither of them had gotten into trouble together before. Maybe it was that they had gotten into trouble at all? But that wouldn't explain the lack of presence of other quite notorious rule-breakers. Still, the prospect of this being a disciplinary meeting made the idea of going in there even less appealing.

But Wes was in there, and he sure as hell didn't look like he wanted to be. It seemed that they were still waiting on Mihai--if it had been him alone, he might've just skipped it, to hell with what she wanted to say. But if they were waiting, then he was keeping Wes too, and that he actually did feel bad about. Mihai didn't usually get involved with the younger students (kids were kind of a pain), but Wes was pretty cute in his own way and Mihai did appreciate the younger one's taste for pranks. So it was with Wes' interest in mind that Mihai went in, hoping it wouldn't take long.

"Hey, sorry," he greeted the pair, grinning much more cheerfully than he felt. It wasn't that he was upset--perhaps simply more apathetic to the entire arrangement, even if he would've preferred getting back to his room. "I totally forgot about this. Er, Ms. Spencer, I'm guessing?" He directed this towards the woman across from Wes. The part about forgetting the meeting wasn't totally a lie (and even then he partly hoped he'd simply kept forgetting about it). "What did you want to see me for? What's--" he gestured vaguely at the chairs arranged in a circle "--going on?"