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texts | palmer bros.

jason: thanks bro.

jason: i mean, he's not as bad as josephine or hudson and he seemed pretty upset about it the other day.

jason: but yeah you're right.

jason: what does getting spooky entail? but it's not like i have anything else planned so sure.

nate: not as /bad/? i love u, but clearly i've left you with matty for way too long. WAIT. ....ya'll aren't...? yknow....👀

nate: i mean no judgment, i just think u can do better

nate: & not much, just having have a good ol' family friendly night of potion making, ritual casting, and maybe a séance if i'm feelin frisky? idk, i just wanna go full on method acting with this shit

oofscenestlr​:

one thing that’s held through the past few years of dealing with nat is that he somehow always manages to make it about him. she had first hand experience, the constant days and nights when orson would pair them together was like a thorn in her side. getting through scenes was tough, but she tried to stay professional about it. so what if she was a try-hard? she was doing more than half the people here anyway.

“i’m not even gonna try and respond to that fucked up theory. just some advice for you - maybe get your head out of your ass and realize the world isn’t in love with you. in fact, the world has a lot more things going on than falling to their knees to worship you.” she’s bitter, it’s true. and maybe this was a losing fight, but she had to hold her own. she was a perfectionist, that much is true, and if nate couldn’t see there was anything to gain from that, it was lost on him. but trying so hard to impress orson’s ghost? grace had no respect for orson anymore. “have you considered i work so hard to get where i am for myself? and not for the fake validation of some ghost busy haunting our school and the real murderer?”

giving somebody shit for actually caring about something, especially their craft, is the lowest hanging fruit and while nate knows that, it doesn’t stop him from standing behind his words. because yeah, while grace’s work ethic was something fierce, she had generally not been a nice person from the moment nate met her. and in the wake of orson’s death, she still didn’t seem to get it. and maybe she never would. “save me the fucking diatribe about how you’re so different from the rest of us and how much you’ve sacrificed to get here. ‘cause if you wanna compare notes, we could be here all night,” nate takes another long inhale of the joint and closes his eyes.

for a moment he thinks he can feel it — the warmth of this particular strain — but it doesn’t last long. clearly whatever he had going on right now was not going to be solved with just one smoke. 

it’s a small revelation that he chooses not to focus on, so nate turns back to grace instead. “look, did you come outside to just yell at me about petty shit or did you wanna smoke and try to chill the fuck out for once? i mean, aren’t you tired of all this fighting? i know i am. i’m fucking tired, grace.” nate pushes himself off of the railing he was leaning up against and extends the joint to her. things were changing around here — and while drugs weren’t going to fix any of their issues, nate didn’t have it in him to keep throwing insults back and forth. not tonight, at least.

ofhelens​:

Matching Nate’s light tone with her own japes (or at least, passable attempt at a joke - humour was never something that came easily), Helen’s expression wrinkled into an easy smile. “All those heretical dances in the woods? Or is that too The Crucible for Shakespeare?” She thought about telling him how the notion of running away felt appealing to her sometimes too - how dancing barefoot under moonlight felt like solace. Was it fear or bravery that kept her anchored? “Me…neither. I hope Heidi knows what she’s doing - I’m not sure she does…maybe I should offer to swap with someone? Like Jonah?”

.

nate laughs and makes a mental note about asking heidi her particular thoughts concerning the witches. suddenly, the idea of dancing barefoot onstage along with saffi and grace is hilarious, and he definitely wants it to happen. “oh please, i’m sure willy would’ve loved the crucible. fear, lies, hysteria, and witchcraft are the exact words i’d use to describe the scottish play, y’know? a match made in...purgatory? hell?” nate shakes his head at her response, “helen, it’s literally going to be fine. try not to worry so much about it. i’ll keep you entertained from the wings when you’re onstage, or whatever, until you’re comfortable. it’s our last show. we’ve gotta give it our best shot.” nate smiles at her, but hearing jonah’s name makes him a little anxious, so he backs up for as second. 

“but uh, speaking of jonah....have you talked to him lately?”

.

scenestlr​:

grace’s lines were circling in her mind throughout most of the day. she knows her role well enough, has studied in her free time ever since learning who she’d play, and really, prince escalus wasn’t a difficult role. what she didn’t prepare for was that terrible feeling of returning to alderidge and being around everyone once again. she feels stares everywhere she goes, and she knows that after she goes on, it’ll only increase.

she can’t think about how she feels like the stares were becoming less and less about her and chandler. so she ignores the looks and heads outside. away from the police and everyone else in the refectory, the music fading into the background. she appreciates the night chill as it settles into her bones, her footsteps light upon the cobblestone. she lets out a small breath, and for a moment feels at peace. right until she hears his voice, reciting a soft line from the play. and of course, nate palmer had to be out here at the one spot away from the rest of the tiny bubble that was alderidge. she considers poking fun at his running of lines but lets the comment die in her throat. (does she say anything? does she keep walking past him like she didn’t see him? what do you say to someone who found a dead body?) 

she moves towards the backdoors again, careful in her steps, but stops when she realizes the detectives have patrolled to their side of the room now. great. she wasn’t guilty, she knew that, but she didn’t want any interaction with them and whatever they wanted to find out. she turns back around, striding quickly towards the outside and where nate was smoking. she couldn’t handle the detectives and stares, but she knows she can handle nate palmer. “wow,” she intones as she leans against the outer wall, now concealed from the doors. “i didn’t mean to, uh, interrupt your serious rehearsal time. apologies.”

there are just some people in the world who don’t want to see others happy, and at this point, nate is convinced that grace ishihara is one of those people. he knew it was practically impossible for them to not see each other again ─ with such a small class size and the loom of orson’s death hanging over the department like a nimbus cloud, there was a high probability that he would have to talk to grace again before they graduated. which, honestly, couldn’t come any sooner.

nate laughs, because he always does, but this one is short and dry. “no worries. i’m just taking a page out of your book, y’know? trying to be a serious actor who cares about his craft for once. but, i gotta admit,” nate turns to face her and flicks his lighter open, “it’s as boring as it sounds.” the end of the joint burns, and nate looks back at grace with his best poker face.

there are plenty of things he could say right now that would probably be unnecessarily harsh, so he keeps his mouth shut for once. he has some sense of self-control, after all. instead, he takes a quick puff and asks, “those detectives are here for you, right?”

nate’s social media  — twitter

believe it or not, nate’s got a pretty consistent thing going with twitter. his first love, nate spends a good amount of time retweeting memes, news articles, and hot takes on pop culture. while he isn’t really sure where all his followers came from, people seem to be having a good time and playing nice in the comments. (even if a few thousand of them are bots.) there’s something about spewing dumb shit in one moment and truth in the next that nate really connects with. if his classmates finally agree to that orgy, he realllllllllly hopes they’ll let him live tweet the whole thing. that should definitely get him 100k by graduation.

where: the castle’s library; when: earlier in the week after the cast announcement; who: @hudscnwilliams​.

although the castle’s library wasn’t as expansive as the main one in alderidge hall, nate still found some good stuff. it had been a pretty long day even by a monday’s standards, and nate had waited all day to scour the library for non-Shakespearean references on witches in the 1600s. and if he was lucky, nate was hoping to find something that would resemble an actual spell, or at least ingredients for a potion. maybe he’d practice on his peers, y’know, totally as a joke — or method acting. there was a book he had climbed up to reach, but had misjudged its weight, so it slips out of his hands and brings down almost the whole row with it, a book knocking him in the head in the process. nate hops down and starts to pick things up off the ground. “...i’m okay! ....i think! ....if anyone cares!” 

chandlerrosen​:

chandler walked into the refectory, copy of macbeth in tow, in search of a cup of coffee. their first read-through was coming up soon and she had to make positive she was prepared. eyes would be on her, and many of her peers could smell fear and insecurity, and wouldn’t hesitate to capitalize on it. grabbing her coffee, she headed for a table near the window to read in peace, when she noticed someone was trying to get her attention. “oh, hello,” she said coolly, smiling a bit when he called her ‘lady ‘beth,’ reminding her of her latest success, “congratulations, by the way, i can’t wait to see you as a witch. i’m sure you’ll make it your own!” looking around the refectory as if expecting heidi to come and scold her for not spending every waking moment poring over the play, she turned her attention back to nate, “sure, nate,” she said hesitantly, sitting across from him with her cup of coffee. chandler was preparing for the worst; though nate was mostly harmless, he had a tendency to say whatever was on his mind, regardless of how it would be received. which is quite admirable, in a sense, but often got on chandler’s nerves, especially in moments when she was particularly vulnerable and emotional. still, he had a good sense of humor, and chandler appreciated about seventy percent of the things that came out of his mouth. “what is it?”

to be honest, nate hadn’t had much personal interaction with chandler. he knew her well enough to understand that she had obviously been through some shit these past couple of months, probably tenfold since she actually still, uh, cared - or cares - about orson. nate had thought about reaching out, but he didn’t know if that would’ve just been weird or if chandler wanted to even be around him. but there she was, sitting down at the table. and now nate didn’t know if he’d have the nerve to say what had originally been on his mind. he stalls for half a moment, hopefully not long enough to notice. “...i just wanted to get your quick opinion on something, actually. take a listen.” he lets out his best cackle, trying to embody the crones and hags of generations before. it’s loud, but just when other students start to turn and look their way, nate stops. he grins, “not bad for an amateur try, huh? it’s all part of my plan to slowly submerge myself in the role until i’ve lost my mind and i don’t know who am i anymore. ugh, can’t wait.”

“you feeling good about lady m, right? 

ofhelens​:

Matching his smile with one of her own, Helen laughs gently. “Hell, for sure. I have a feeling that Abigail Williams would have fit snugly in one of Shakespeare’s plays.” Probably played by Zahra. If Orson had his way. If Heidi was casting - who knew? The uncertainty of Alderidge, which had always been such a constant, made her anxious. Nudging gently into him, she nodded in thanks. “I don’t deserve you.”  She wasn’t sure any of them deserved Nate. Had she followed that thought through to its completion, she might have felt guilt that they were the one forced to witness her witchcraft…but as it was, she dropped it; distracted by the mention of Jonah. “No?” Puzzled, she knotted her eyebrows. “Did he…did he do something?”

it was one thing to banter with helen about heidi or the play, but then just like that, nate decides to switch up the conversation on her - a part of him wondered if it was the right time. but when would this opportunity come up again? he raises an eyebrow for a moment at helen’s response  - did jonah do something? well, damn. it’s not like it’s any of his business, but in nate’s experience, that kind of question only came from someone who, even in the slightest way, had already assumed he was guilty. it was a nicer way of saying ‘what did you do?’ and - shit, now he’s definitely reading too much into it. nate shakes his head, “nah, he didn’t do anything. it’s just the week of auditions he had a really...rough morning, and i might’ve cried and tried stuffing his face with waffles, and i was just curious if you had heard from him. that’s all.” nate shrugs and then tries to offer helen another smile to diffuse any of her worries. “even though we live together, i feel like we’ve been like two ships passing in the night.”

pvlmer​:

jason follows nate into his room. despite the fact that they’re seen to a lot of people as twins, they had never really been all that alike. but for some reason, it still worked. even though there were times when jason couldn’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like if he were an only child, but he always tried to keep those thoughts at bay. because nate was his brother, and it was wrong to have all of those thoughts. even though he had them. 

“oh, right, the kitchen. i don’t think my grilled cheese can come anywhere close to the ones we get on postmates,” jason replies with a shrug. going to the kitchen to make them himself hadn’t even occurred to jason, because he always figured that no one would want anything he made – not his cooking, not his acting, not his love. “greasy and lots of calories.” he orders from his phone before sitting down next to nate. it almost feels like they’re back home, how they both used to sit on the floor and talk. they didn’t seem to do that much anymore. that was mostly jason’s fault, he had always kept certain parts of himself hidden from his brother. not because he didn’t trust him, but he just didn’t want nate to feel bad about anything. it wasn’t nate’s fault that he was more talented than jason, and that their parents loved him more. he never wanted his brother to know about the darkness that lived within him, his brother was a golden light, he didn’t deserve to see that. jason laughed at nate’s joke, despite the fact that the night had been heavy, he could always count on nate to make him laugh and take the weight off.

“i mean…just everything that happened at the winter masque. i couldn’t imagine anyone from our program killing orson so it was really weird to hear someone accusing us of killing him.”

jason hated lying to nate. he also hated how easy it was. maybe it was because he had had so much practice. so many years biting his tongue and pretending like he wasn’t angry, so many years pretending that he wouldn’t do anything just to get a fraction of what his brother got. but he had to lie to nate. he couldn’t let his brother see who he truly was, nate was one of the only people who loved jason and once he found out what a monster his brother was, that would all go away. he couldn’t corrupt his brother’s mind. so he lied through his teeth, like he had done so many times before.

if nate was honest with himself, he’d admit that jason was in his blind spot. 

nate took pride in being able to separate the truth from the bullshit on a regular basis, but he had never ever been able to get a solid read on jason. and yeah, he knew it was painfully ironic that one of the closest people in his life was also the main person nate sometimes felt like he knew nothing about. and that freaked him out on occasion ─ probably because he still held onto a lot of guilt from their upbringing. but fuck, he was tired of playing that tune. one of these days he’d quit party drugs cold turkey, go back to his weekly visits with dr. june, apologize to his brother, forget about orson, and get on with his fucking life. that day, unfortunately, was not today.

nate looks at jason longer than he should before it becomes noticeable, but nate really wants to take him in as long as he can. when he sees jason, he sees the shy kid who tagged along on (most) of his adventures. he sees a sweet, kind brother and son. he couldn’t be capable of actual terror, could he? had jason been developing into someone else this whole time and nate had been too selfish enough to notice? nate flashes a grin with his shrug, and hopes that it’s enough. but he wants to nudge at the issue, if even just a little bit further.

“i don’t know j, you never know who’s capable of something like that. you might be their roommate. their friend. hell, their brother. the claims had to have some truth to them, right?” nate sighs, “i’m just glad i don’t have to worry about you.”