Update: Seraph and Sentinel, Ch. 11

By the end of class, Max was no less tangled up in her head when Nathan dragged a chair over and dropped into it beside her without asking. He leaned in close, close enough that she caught the faint, familiar edge of his cologne, and for a moment his attention seemed to narrow completely onto her screen.

“That one looks like it should be on a movie poster,” he said, pointing at a dramatic shot of fog hanging over the Bay on an early morning.

There was a softness in his voice she wasn’t used to hearing in class. It was less performative, almost… pleased?

Max rolled her eyes. “You’re just saying that because it’s moody.” She tried to quell the smile that threatened to cross her lips.

“Moody sells,” he replied, a small smirk tugging at his mouth. It faded just as quickly, his gaze drifting for half a second before snapping back to the image like he’d caught himself wandering.

“So,” he said eventually, “you got time tonight?”

“We could grab food,” he added, glancing at her, an almost-hesitant confidence threading through his tone.

It was exactly the kind of invitation she’d imagined and feared in equal measure, but... “I... can’t,” she slipped out. She cleared her throat. “I, uh… I already told Rachel I’d study with her.”

“Rachel?” he asked like he was trying to sound casual, but even he couldn't hide the surprise from his voice.

“Yeah. She texted me earlier.”

“Well,” he grinned, “put in a good word for me, then.”

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Update: Miss Caulfield and Other Bad Ideas, Chapter 8

The image began to bloom in the developer tray, slow and ghostlike.

Nathan leaned in without thinking, breath caught in his throat as the shapes sharpened. A lighthouse blossomed from the bone white paper. A striped pillar, tall and solitary—its beam smeared into long, glowing arcs across the surface of the ocean, light dragged and stretched into a soft saucer shape by the long exposure. The water below looked unreal, shimmering with hints of the lighthouse's light, the horizon line of the sky barely there.

Nathan was hit by a sickening feeling of déjà vu, and then he realized what it was coming from: the lighthouse from Arcadia.

"That looks just like a place from back home,” he said before he could stop himself.

Max glanced over at him, then back down at the tray, her smile softening as she rocked it gently. “Does it?”

“Yeah,” he murmured. “There’s a lighthouse near where I grew up. On a cliff. Woods before you can get up to it. Kinda lonely, just like this.” He swallowed. “This is… really close.”

The resemblance was uncanny. The framing, the isolation, the way the light cut through darkness—it tugged something half-buried yet dreadfully painful up from his memories.

Salt air. Wind. Strawberry blonde hair glimmering by the cliff's edge.

Max gave him a pleased, almost knowing look. “It reminded me of a place from my childhood too,” she said wistfully, eyes still on the print.

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Update: Every Version of You, Chapter 19

He finally looked at her then, his eyes hollow, distant. “Yeah. Well, welcome to the family business, I guess.”

Max’s chest ached, her grip tightening on his sleeve. She wanted to pull him out of that place, drag him away from the bricks and shadows and everything they meant.

But instead she whispered, timid but fierce, “I’ll help him. I’ll help the other you, too.”

Nathan’s mouth pulled into something caught between a grimace and a smirk. He just stayed silent, refusing to meet her eyes.

Max gave him a pained look. “Thank you for... showing me. We should probably, um, go back.”

Nathan huffed, straightening his shoulders and jerking his head toward the street. “Yeah. Before someone calls the cops on us for loitering in scenic piss alley.” He started walking and Max followed, keeping pace with him though the silence pressed thick between them at first.

The sunlight outside looked too bright after the shadowed corner, but Nathan didn’t slow his stride.

“So. What the hell even makes you hopscotch between worlds?" He looked down at her, then. "You trip and fall? Or is it like—bam, nosebleed, welcome to Prescott hellscape number two?”

Max bit her lip, thinking hard. “I… I’m not sure. But… it always seems to happen when I’m overwhelmed. With you.”

Nathan shot her a sidelong look, brow arched. “With me? You saying I’m so fucking irresistible it breaks reality?”

She flushed instantly. “That’s not—Nathan, I’m serious.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, eyes forward, but there was a weak smirk tugging at his mouth.

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it's uppppp!

Her heart skips a beat when she catches sight of him – for a split second, her excitement almost feels like fear, but she shakes it off. She must just be nervous because of what happened at the last party. He is wearing a dark red sweater over a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up; he looks good in red. His dark jeans are just about the same shade as her skirt, and Max blushes as she realizes they are practically matching. 

It's finished! Here is the promised Caulscott, and it's nauseatingly fluffy.

Update: Miss Caulfield and Other Bad Ideas, Chapter 7

Warren launched right into the problem set, his tone chipper and patient in that I’m used to dealing with idiots but I’m still gonna smile through it way. He scribbled equations across the whiteboard, talking about refraction indices, angular deviation, and wave interference like any of it made sense. The guy couldn’t have been more than five, maybe six years older than them, but he acted like some ancient physics sage looking down from Olympus on the two idiot undergrads.

What made it all worse was Hayden, who kept asking the same questions — in slightly different wording — like he was stuck in some weed-induced feedback loop.

“So, wait,” Hayden said for the third time, leaning forward with his pen dangling between his fingers, “if light bends when it enters water, does that mean it’s technically, like, slower underwater?”

Warren pinched the bridge of his nose but still smiled. “Yeah, that’s… that’s literally the whole point of refraction. The speed of light changes depending on the medium, but—”

“Right, right, yeah,” Hayden cut in, nodding slowly. “But then, like… why?”

Nathan watched Warren’s polite expression crack for just half a second. The guy looked like he wanted to bang his head against the board. He sighed through his nose, rubbing his temple. “Because— okay, look, remember what I just told you? Remember how I said that the refractive index of the medium determines the phase velocity—"

To hell with the buddy-buddy bullshit. “Jesus Christ, man, you don’t have to talk to him like that,” Nathan snapped.

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