By the time he was fifteen, Jonathan Farrow was Alex's best friend. A result of being his only friend.
They met for the first time when Alex was six and Jack was seven, at the Farrow's New Year's Eve party. It wasn't the first time Alex had been, but it was the first he remembered clearly. The kids were always corralled into the greenhouse on the estate, watched over by tired nannies and the occasional older sibling. That year, Jack teamed up with Sean and Laurent to find different ways to terrify Alex with bugs they found around the greenhouse. Jack won their little competition when he found a field mouse burrowed in a corner and dropped it in Alex's hair. Alex could have sworn he felt little feet crawling over his scalp for a week after that.
Alex was determined to keep his distance, but the next year the Farrows requested Alex be Jack's watchdog. They weren't too keen on their son's behavior and thought for some reason that Alex would be able to curve it. He wasn't. If anything, his presence made things worse. Jack would decide exactly what he was going to do based on how much he knew Alex would hate it. Jack would cause even more trouble and Alex would be blamed for not being able to stop it. As if Alex was supposed to do something about the fact that Jack never listened to him, or would simply hit him or push him aside whenever Alex tried to physically stop him.
As if it wasn't bad enough to have to deal with Jack at all those social events, his parents sent him to England for secondary school. Conrad Prep, the international school Alex's family founded and ran. To humans, it was known as a boarding school for the children of diplomats and wealthy foreigners. To wyverns, it was a school founded by old families for old families, created so their children wouldn't have to socialize with the masses. Human and wyvern alike.
Because Jack was held back a year while he was in America, he wound up being in the same year as Alex. All the Farrows had to do was ask, and suddenly Jack was Alex's flatmate. They were placed in all the same lessons together. The only break during his school day Alex got was his language lesson when he went to French and Jack was in Italian.
Jack hated the arrangement as much as Alex did. He didn't like being babysat by a timid younger boy. He hated having to go to school in England, away from all his friends and the familiarity of his home in New York. He was especially bitter his first year. Alex was positive he was trying to do everything in his power to get kicked out. Finally, near the end of the year, he resorted to starting a physical fight with Alex in the middle of the hallways. All it did was land both of them with stable clean-up duties for a month.
"This is ridiculous," he muttered, leaning by one of the horse stalls while Alex was cleaning it out. "If you don't get kicked out for decking the headmaster's nephew, what will get you kicked out?"
Alex tried to ignore him. The right side of his face throbbed from where Jack had hit it. He hadn't even tried to justify or preface it with anything. He just walked up to Alex and slugged him in the face without warning. He had also gotten a couple of jabs to his side before a teacher pulled him off, but they didn't hurt as much as the initial hit.
"Hey, you listening?"
Alex tightened his grip on the shovel he used to clean out the stall. "Not really," he said, digging the shovel into a pile of dung while trying not to envision it as Jack's head. "I'm a bit busy."
"Can't you multitask?"
"Can't you?"
Jack was quiet for a moment before he sighed. "Fine," he said, picking up a shovel and going into the stall next to Alex. Alex tried not to stare as he did. He was pretty sure that was the first time Jack had done anything resembling listening to him. The mare inside the stall next to Jack sniffed at his fluffy hair and tried to take a bite out of it like it was a tuft of grass. Jack swatted her away, but after a second she was doing it again. "Get off, you dumb horse."
Alex propped his shovel up against the wall of his stall and walked over to the mare. As much as he wanted to watch Jack struggle, he didn't want him to hurt her.
"Her name is Parsnip," Alex said, picking up some loose hay from the ground and waving it in front of her face. She forgot about Jack's hair and took it from Alex's hand, then started trying to eat his hair as well. "And she's not dumb."
"She's trying to eat your head."
"Just my hair." Alex guided her away from his head gently, and she let a puff of air out of her nostrils as Alex stroked her muzzle. "She just wants attention. She belongs to Julia, but Julia doesn't ride her much anymore. She's just lonely."
"Never took you for a horse girl."
"Don't you have shit to shovel?"
Jack looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Wow, you are mad, aren't you?"
"You punched me in the face just because you've been throwing a yearlong tantrum over having me as your babysitter. Something I'm not exactly thrilled about either, by the way."
"It's not just about that."
"What is it about, then?"
The two stared down at each other for a minute until Jack was the first to break eye contact. "Whatever," he muttered, finally digging his shovel into the dung littering his stall. "I don't have to explain anything to you."
"No, I guess you don't."
Once Alex was sure Parsnip had gotten her to fill of attention he went back to his stall. He noticed she would occasionally nuzzle Jack's head again, but rather than swat her away Jack would pet her until she was satisfied.
Alex was almost done with his share of the stalls when Jack finally spoke again. "I'm sorry," he said, so quietly and out of nowhere that Alex thought he was talking to a horse. But when he looked over, Jack was looking directly at him.
"For what?"
"What do you think, genius?"
"I know you're probably not well-versed in apologies, but they usually don't involve insults."
Jack sighed and tapped his forehead on the end of his shovel's handle a couple of times. "For hitting you," he said, clearly channeling all his self-control to keep himself from adding something biting at the end. "You're right. It was... immature to do that."
"Immature?"
"Fine, it was a total dick move!" Jack shook his head and went back to tossing dung in his wheelbarrow. "Never mind, you probably don't believe me anyways."
Alex watched him work for a couple of seconds, noticing how his ears were tinged with red with embarrassment. "No, I believe you," he decided to say, and once he did, he knew it was true. Jack Farrow wouldn't be embarrassed by an apology he didn't mean.
"You do?"
"Yeah."
"Do you... Do you accept it?"
"No."
Annoyance flickered across Jack's face for a second before he could compose himself. "What do you mean no?"
"Just because your apology is sincere that doesn't mean I have to accept it. Besides, saying sorry is only part of it. And not to be splitting hairs- though at this point I feel like I've earned it- you have a lot more to apologize for than punching me in the face."
"Like what?"
"Oh, Jonathan, you do not want to go down that road."
Jack frowned and narrowed his eyes. "Have you always been this snarky?"
"Probably not. Maybe it started when you spiked the water cooler in the locker room with laxatives back in January. Or when you set my great aunt's dress on fire at my grandfather's party and got me blamed for it. Or it could have been back when you tried to turn my head into a rat's mobile home!"
"Okay, first of all, it was a mouse," Jack said, throwing down his shovel. "Get your fucking facts right. Secondly, that was like five years ago. Get over it!"
"I was six and you were cruel. You saw the way my cousins picked on me and how I didn't fight back and saw the perfect punching bag for you to get out of whatever issues you refuse to talk to anyone about. That's what you've been doing ever since. And I'm done taking it."
"Yeah? Did that hit to your jaw finally knock your backbone loose?"
"Evidently, yes."
"Well, you're welcome, then."
Alex rolled his eyes and went back to shoveling his stalls. He felt Jack's eyes on him as he finished the last one and dragged his overfilled wheelbarrow out back. Jack was still watching him when he came back in. When he opened his mouth, Alex was ready to go off if he asked him to finish his remaining stalls for him, but he managed to say something completely unexpected.
"Do you care?" He said, looking directly into Alex's eyes. His expression was so serious it made Alex feel uncomfortable.
"About?" Alex asked, trying to shake off his sudden unease.
"Before when I said I wasn't just upset about you being my babysitter, you asked what I was upset about. Do you care what the answer is? Cause most people, when they ask, don't care. They just feel like they have to, or they think if they do ask then you'll shut up faster. So, do you care?"
"Do you want to tell me?"
Jack sighed and jammed his shovel so deep into the ground that it stood upright on its own. He leaned back against the stall's wall so that Parsnip had easy access to his hair again. "I hate being here," Jack started, ignoring the mare as she chewed on his hair. "But not because there's anything wrong with her. Or you, even. I mean, this school isn't that different than Highlands Prep back in New York. Neither are the people. And sometimes, it's even nice to be outside the city. Boring, mostly, but nice sometimes."
"So, what is it that you hate?"
"I hate the fact that my parents keep making me somebody's else problem. It's nothing new. They've been doing it my whole life. Hell, they made me your problem when you were still old enough to be watching Sesame Street. This time just feels like the most blatant step. Shipping me off to another country so they don't have to see first-hand all the ways I'm screwing up. But I don't know why I'm even trying so hard to go back. Even if I do manage to get kicked out of here, they'll just send me somewhere else they don't have to see me."
"You'll never get kicked out if your parents don't want you to be," Alex said, finally answering the question Jack had asked at the beginning of their chore. "My family is too scared of yours to do anything that might upset them."
Jack grimaced. "I had a feeling that was the case... I'm sick of that too. You ever get sick of that, Al?"
Alexander tried not to react too much to the new nickname. Jack had only ever called Alex Lexi, the nickname his cousins had started using to tease him. "Sick of what?"
"The way people treat us because of our families. They're scared of us. Jealous of us. Angry at us. Trying to get something from us. There's always something there, even before they know us. Some motivation, some assumption. It's like you never meet a stranger with a clean slate. Like there's a sign constantly above your head that everyone is reading differently." When Alex didn't respond right away, Jack's expression turned slightly panicked. "You know what I mean?" he asked, his voice slightly desperate.
"I do," Alex said quietly, and then again in case Jack didn't hear or believe him. "I do."
Jack's expression melted into relief. "You know most of my friends back home are human," Jack said. "A couple of them know my family has money because they connected the dots with my last name being the same as the one on all those stupid hotels. But some of them still haven't even figured that out. And my parents don't get why I hang out with them. Why don't they get it?"
"The things you can't stand are the same things they live for," Alex said, though he was talking about his mother now. "The recognition, the fear, the influence. They love it. My cousins do too."
"I think my siblings are the same... Why did we come out different?"
"I think it's because my French tutor was nice to me."
"What?"
"My French tutor. Monsieur Abbey. He's not old family, and he never really seemed to care that I was. Not around me, at least. He was the first person to treat me like a regular child, and it just felt so much nicer than having people treat me like a time bomb. Other than my dad, he was the first person that it felt like..." Alex trailed off, worried Jack might make fun of him, but he finished the thought for him.
"Loved you?"
"... Yeah."
Jack looked thoughtfully at his still-upright shovel. "Miranda Singh," he said suddenly.
"Who?"
"Miranda Singh. We met in kindergarten. All the other kids were staying away because they were scared of me. She pushed me off the swing set and kicked sand in my face."
"Charming."
Jack smiled dreamily. "Yeah. She's not an old family either. Just ballsy. She's the only wyvern I've ever really thought of as my friend. Knowing her just makes it so much harder to put up with the way everyone else treats us."
"Yeah."
"I'm glad I know her, though."
"Yeah."
Parsnip tugged a little too hard on Jack's hair, causing him to duck away and grab his shovel again. "Alright, alright. I get it, you're tired of the shit smell. Maybe you should think about shitting less than, Persimmon."
"Parsnip," Alex corrected with a chuckle.
"Whatever. You finished your half; shouldn't you be leaving?"
Alex answered by taking off the gloves he had been wearing and putting them back in their space on the wall. When he got to the doors of the stables Jack called out again.
"Hey, Alexander!"
Alex turned around to see Jack wearing another expression he had never seen before. Bashful was the only word that Alex could put to it.
"If I cover your half of the stables for the rest of our little punishment here," he was saying, looking just about everywhere except at Alex, "would you forgive me for the punch at least?"
Alex felt himself smile without meaning to. "Why don't you cover my half and we'll see," he decided to say.
Jack grinned at that answer. "You know I think I could get used to Backbone Alexander."
"... You can call me Al. If you want."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"... How about Allie?"
"Don't push your luck."