✏️ Under One Roof

6. Two Treasures

This bonus chapter is dedicated to ImmortalSoul, with thanks for supporting me. Thank you!

They were still eating breakfast when there was a knock on the door. One of Mr Spanner's friends, who had agreed to drive all the belongings that they couldn't carry themselves. The arrival of their furniture meant that their morning conversations never got beyond platitudes and general small talk. Not that Tegan could have a real conversation with Ness anyway; he just stared down at his plate, and the only words he said to her over his food were a single "thank you" when prompted by his father.

There were a lot of boxes, and quite a few pieces of furniture. They had a proper table and a set of almost-matching chairs in the dining room now, and two couches opposite a TV unit in the lounge. This was when the new house should start feeling like a home, although there were still more things that Tegan was sure they would need.

She didn't touch the drum kit, but several times she caught herself staring at it, deep in thought. Tegan idly hoped that someone else might decide what to do with it, even if the only likely option was moving it up to her room. But she knew it wasn't really going to happen, and she would have to decide for herself what to do with this thing. Finding out who had owned it before was probably a big part of it, but did she need the item to be so close to her in order to do that?

"You play?"

Tegan almost jumped out of her skin when she heard Ness's voice behind her. She realised that she'd been standing in the lounge staring at it for a couple of minutes, while Logan helped her father to organise all the boxes of kitchen utensils.

Those two words were the third and fourth she'd heard him say, but she still knew who it was right away. And he actually sounded interested this time. She didn't want to tell him anything, but she also didn't want to give her dad any reason to say she was being antisocial. She needed to give some kind of answer, but something that wouldn't give him any leverage to manipulate her. She certainly didn't want a boy to know where any of her mental weak points were, because any boy would just keep on poking until he managed to break her down.

"Not drums," she said. "They were a gift. It's more... like sentimental value. Maybe. From my mum."

"Oh," he said, and the words were different somehow. Like he was actually thinking about what he was saying, rather than making the minimum acceptable effort to be polite to his new family members. And that gave Tegan a little hope that they might be able to tolerate each other's company once he knew that he wasn't going to have any power over her. She didn't know much about his interest in music, but it was at least something that they had in common. "I guess that's... kind of like my keyboard. I don't..."

"You play?" she asked, a little flippantly. It was the same question he had asked only a moment before, so it seemed kind of appropriate. And she was sure that if his situation were anything like hers, she would be able to get a good sense of his personality from how he responded. Maybe it would even give her a better way of defending herself from any further bullying.

"Not really," he answered, the words coming as if from a great distance. "I tried learning. Before. Got really into it, but..."

Tegan couldn't see what could have linked music to such despair. Her own feelings around the drums were all tangled up in her complex relationship with her mother, but even so she wouldn't see that as a reason to actually avoid playing them. She was sure that if she'd actually learned more than a basic proficiency in the instrument, those feelings wouldn't have been enough to stop her. So what could be going through Ness's mind, to make him sound so forlorn? Maybe someone had told him that music wasn't manly or something, and he had a reputation to preserve. But still, that guess didn't sound in any way feasible.