[Private] Running Up that Hill

Hawke flopped down onto the stairs leading up to the dormitories with a grunt, massaging his leg. By his side, two bags filled to the brim with various groceries (most of it disgustingly unhealthy, such as ready-meals and snacks) looked fit to tip their contents all over the stairs and cause a serious health hazard. Probably not something you'd want in a school for people already toeing the line between life and death, right?

After his conversation with Jimmy, Hawke had made it to the school gates where his parents picked him up in the family car and drove him to explore the city of Toronto a bit. They'd eaten a pretty nice meal in Le Festin, as evidenced by the heady smell of garlic emanating from Hawke's mouth (he'd succumbed to an old favorite of his, garlic prawns). Following that they'd returned to the new Hawke family home, and Tiberius had spoken to his sister on Skype for a while, telling her about the new school and people (person) he'd met so far. The conversation had been bittersweet, he was overjoyed that he'd been able to get a hold of her for the first time in a while, but it reminded him that it was still another three months until he'd see her again. Unlike normal siblings, Tegan and her brother got on extremely well, and the accident had only improved their relationship. Once Hawke became a cripple, his sister had begun to look after him, just as he had looked after her since she was born. She suffered from severe respiratory problems, and now the two of them could spend their time being lazy together, and Hawke finally had a legitimate excuse!

After the Skype call, Hawke had closed the lid of the laptop and his parents dragged him out of the house once more to take him around the local supermarket, buying him groceries to cook with until the school cafeteria opened. While the cooking facilities in the dorms weren't ideal, the students were still provided with a very basic kitchen in the dorm's common room, so he made sure to stock up on microwave meals. After buying his groceries, they dropped him off at the school gate, shouted goodbye, and sped off back into the depths of Toronto.

And thus, Hawke found himself sprawled on a staircase, groceries everywhere and a sharp stabbing pain in his leg. It wasn't an ideal situation, but there you go. He'd just begun considering phoning up Ellie, the blind girl he "buddied" for, when he heard a voice calling out behind him.

Alright, she had only wasted 20 minutes to find the dorms again. It was an improvement right ? That's what Caroline decided to believe as she was rolling her wheelchair toward the building. Sure, she had needed to exit the school just to be able to spot the dorms and go back to them but she wasn't going to take that as a defeat. That was probably only because of the damn library, she stayed in there for like an hour, discussing with a blind girl and looking for books that were obviously not here. As a result, when she finally left the room, she had completely forgotten what paths to take to go back to her room.
In fact, 20 minutes was a pretty good outcome, it could have been much worse.

The french girl decided she was actually having a good day : the school seemed nice – even though it was absurdly big – and she had already met a friendly girl. A girl that was like 6 years younger than her but that was a start. Plus, as she approached the dorm, she saw that someone was probably having a worse day than her. A guy was here, on the stairs, sprawled like he had just run a marathon, two bags of groceries surrounding him. He looked young so he was probably a student, maybe having troubles to take his food to his room.

The wheelchair rolled until she was only two meters away from the stair, the young woman on it displaying a huge smile. She was still wearing the clothes she had when landing earlier today, which mean an old grey jean and a white geeky shirt. This one figured a warrior with a horned helmet and an iron armor clearly arguing with a little woman with white silvery hair, apparently trying to protect three little dragons from him. Caroline kinda ruined the scene when she crossed her arms under her chest to look at the guy in the stair.

“Need a hand or two ?” she asked.

She remembered only after that she maybe should have been a bit more tactful but it was too late anyway.

"A new leg would be nice." Hawke sighed, before looking down at the other girl. The first thing he noticed, of course, was the wheelchair.

Oh, shit...

"I mean, err.." Hawke stammered, having well and truly put his foot in it. He beheld the girl before him, and rightly assumed that she was a student. If her apparent age didn't give it away, the wheelchair certainly did.

"Sorry. Tact doesn't come easily to me." He sighed eventually, not bothering to try and salvage the situation. He shifted his weight, placing both of his feet firmly on the ground. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, and smiled apologetically to the girl. He took the opportunity to study her some more. Despite the chair, he could tell she was tall, possibly as tall as him, and she certainly appeared a year or two older than Hawke. He wasn't sure, but her crossed arms suggested he'd done something to annoy her. From the look of it, she had some kind of pop culture t-shirt on, he thought he spied the familiar horned helm of the Dohvahkiin, but he couldn't be sure.

If the choice of words was poor, it didn't seem to trouble Caroline all that much the first time. It's actually only when he started to seem clearly troubled by his own sentence that the girl understood what was the problem. She took a quick look at her own legs, paralized on her wheelchair, and started to laugh. She wasn't mocking him or anything, simply enjoying the little irony that life could give you from time to time. Her small laughing was strangely feminine, for someone use to strong laugh to horrible joke.

“Don't worry about it, I don't have any of that, so it makes two of us.”

She uncrossed her arms and rested her elbows on the armrests of her wheelchair, smiling widely to the younger boy.

“I'm afraid that, if you're looking for new legs, you are talking to the wrong person.”

Caroline took a longer look at the boy, he was sitting on the stairs, but she could see that he was tall. Taller than her maybe, which was surprisingly easier now that she was in a wheelchair. He didn't seem do have any apparent flaws. Maybe she shouldn't look for that, but she couldn't help it, in a school for disabled, it was logical to try and see what was wrong. Apparently, he had trouble climbing up the stairs, so maybe it was muscular.

“So.... Want me to carry that for you, big boy ?” she asked, grinning as she pointed at the bags.

There was no escalator to access the first flooor of the dorms, but next to the stairs was the obligatory ramp for everyone in wheelchairs. She would have no trouble carrying that.

"Big boy, eh? I'm not sure I'd like that name to catch on." Hawke grinned, glad he hadn't offended her. He relaxed a little, safe in the knowledge that the girl seemed to be very laid back and chilled. He was glad there was at least one other person that was able to joke about their condition - as of yet he wasn't sure how an average Joe dealt with it.

He shook his head as he pushed himself to his feet, then bent over to pick up the bags. The pain in his leg had subsided from a sharp, stabbing pain to more of a dull throb now.

"I'll be able to manage." He reassured her with a smile, "I probably should have guessed my leg would play up, I've not tried carrying anything heavy yet..." He trailed off, unsure if he'd need to help push the girl's wheelchair up the ramp, until he noticed the small joystick that signaled that the wheelchair was a motorised one.

"Heading my way?" He asked, gesturing towards the dorm rooms.

“Too bad you aren't the one to decide if I'll keep the nickname or not.” she said, grinning.

She didn't know the boy at all, but he was the one to start a conversation with a joke about legs, so he probably deserved a little teasing. Sure, that was a very bad excuse on Caroline's side to have a little fun, but she was okay with that. Luckily for him, he didn't seem to feel guilty about his own choices of word for long, she was tired of dealing with people who couldn't watch her in the eye just because of something that stupid. On another hand, it was logical that those people tends to disappear in a school for disabled, she guessed that most of the other studens were probably suffering of the same thing : people afraid of saying something stupid everytime they talked to to them.

He stood up and was – as Caroline had expected – pretty tall, but he also seemed to have a problem with at least one of his leg. Again, it wasn't a surprise at all. And of course, he didn't want to be helped, that would have surprised her. The french girl smiled nicely and backed her wheelchair a bit, turning toward the ramp.

“Nope” she said, smiling “Heading my way, which happen to be the same as yours. Which isn't surprising since it's the dorms.”

She laughed softly and pushed the little controller of her motorized wheelchair. She could have go faster, but she wanted to be sure he'll be able to make the climb without breaking anything.

“By the way, I'm Caroline. Nice to meet you, big boy.”

"The name's Tiberius Hawke." He said, putting on a fake pout as Caroline used her new nickname for him once again, feigning offence. "You could call me that instead of 'big boy', y'know."

Hawke watched in silence as Caroline slowly made her way up the ramp towards him. The motor sounded like it was handling the incline fairly easily, which surprised Hawke. He'd never really been interested in mechanics or engineering, but what little knowledge had allowed him to be impressed with the amount of power carried in such a small place. He'd been in a wheelchair for a while during his stay at hospital, only a couple of days, but he'd had a manual one which required him to use his own strength to get around.

"So, there's a big question." Hawke mused aloud with a smile, "Are you from France or from a French-speaking area of Canada?"

Hawke wasn't exactly sure of the difference between a French and a Canadian French accent were. To him, she sounded just like his mother sounded like when she spoke English.

“I'll try to think about it but I can't make any promises, Big Boy seems way easier to remember than Tiberius. It's still nice though.”

She stopped when her wheelchair reached the top of the stairs and turned around to watch him do the same. In the meantime, she was trying to see how exactly his legs were failing, out of pure stupid and morbid curiosity. She had only know the guy for five minutes but it was enough for her to be curious. He seemed to be at least ok with bad jokes and all, so maybe he won't mind it.

Tiberius heard her accent immediately, of course. Caroline never made any effort to hide it after all, it often sounded worse when she tried to do that. She wondered for a moment if she could lie about it but didn't find any good jokes on that, so she smiled warmly.

“I'm from France. Just got here today, actually. I'm not that good with English so don't expect me to guess where yours come from, but it doesn't sound too american. Somewhere in Great Britain ?”

She had heard different accents before but it was impossible for her ears to know exactly the differences between all of them.

Tiberius rolled his eyes, then grinned. He hoped Caroline was joking about the nickname, and assumed she was, but it was good that he was already making joked with another student. Establishing connections early would probably be a good idea, and in his experience a bit of friendly teasing was always a good place to start in a friendship. He hated being polite and overly-friendly to new people, to him it just came across as false and desperate.

Nobody had ever called his name "nice" though. If anything, people had either laughed or been confused by the name. It wasn't exactly traditional, or normal. He'd often wondered what had possessed his parents to name him after an ancient Roman emperor, but his family did a lot of odd things.

Standing at the top of the stairs, Hawke responded, "I'm from England. London, to be precise." He paused for a second, and then added, "My mother's family is French. I've spent pretty much every Summer of my life in the countryside near Nantes. Veux-tu parler en Français?"

While his accent wasn't perfect, his accent betrayed the fact that he was very familiar with the language.

Caroline thought for a moment that maybe Canada wasn't the best idea for a year outside the country, either she was lucky or everyone here seemed to be capable or talking french. It was only her first day and the only two people she had met already talk to her in her language. Not that it was a problem of course, it was even nice to hear French after spending the whole flight and a few hours in complete English immersion. It just seemed weird.
She made a warm smile to Tiberius, but declined politely in french.

“Non, merci. Je suis venu pour m'entraîner à l'anglais après tout.”

She continued in English, as she didn't know how fluent he was. He seemed to be very good, but you could never really know. She had learned that French could be pretty tricky for some people.

“Not that your French is bad, of course, it's just... i'm here to practice.”

The young girl crossed her arms in front of her chest again, grinning mockingly at the guy, since he was still in the stairs.

“So, how are those bags going on ? Still manageable ?”

"Very well." Hawke replied with a smile, content to revert to his native tongue. At this point, he didn't really need to practice his French, but was more than happy to help her along the way.

Hawke took a decisive step towards the dorms, looking back at the girl in the wheelchair, "I'm a big boy, remember? The bags are fine." He carried on and then continued speaking to her, "I guess we're both in similar situations. We've both traveled halfway across the world to get here."

Hawke wasn't sure about Caroline, but his move hadn't been so bad. His parents had come with him, so the only thing he'd really left behind was his sister. However, he was guaranteed to see her every couple of months for a few weeks so it wasn't such a problem. While he had left friends behind, they'd started drifting apart during the summer holidays as was customary, so he wasn't too upset. they still spoke online from time to time.

Caroline couldn't help but laugh, he really seemed to appreciate that nickname, or hate it. Either way, he kept bringing it on, which only made the young woman's smile bigger.

"Good then. Wouldn't like to have to help you."

She looked at the entrance of the building, thinking about what he just said. He was right, of course, but they were probably not the only one in this situation. This school seemed to have an excellent reputation.

"I guess so. I just got here so I'll see how it'll go. I'm guessing it's fine for a big boy like you."

She laughed again and realized she didn't care at all about leaving home. She hated her parents, and didn't talk to her friends for a long time, except using Skype, and she could still do this here. The only person she was missing - a lot - was her brother, but she didn't want to be a burden for him, so she had to go. It wasn't really a matter of choice here.

Hawke frowned as he saw movement behind a few curtains of the dormitories. Apparently, more people had arrived today. He resigned himself to the fact that he was never gonna remember all their names, so made the decision to commit the few he'd met already into his long-term memory.

"I don't really mind the move." He explained to Caroline, glad that his limp was slowing him down enough to keep a fairly even pace with the wheelchair-bound girl. "My parents moved to Toronto, too. My sister stayed back in England, though." He glanced at the girl by his side, then continued cautiously, "How about you? Did you leave an family behind?"

He wasn't sure if this was too forward of a question to ask somebody he'd just met, but he figured that conversation was soon gonna dry up if they didn't breach new ground sometime soon.