I'll stop wearing black when they make a darker color

It was evening and Ven was watching the sun set on the steps of city hall.

He was dressed, as he normally was, in black. He was wrapped in a warm hoodie, a skullcap that sent his hair sticking out at odd angles, and a pair of black jeans that Ven had once drawn mandalas on the knees with black sharpie. His boots were untied and he was accessorizing with a coffee in his left hand.

He wasn't waiting for anyone particularly, but he did have a second coffee next to him, and Ven thought it'd be nice to have some company to watch the sun set.

"You busy?" he asked the next person to pass him.

"I'm Ven, or Moon Moon, doesn't matter," Ven introduced himself.

He had to recline to look back up at the speaker. Christ, this dude was tall. Ven himself was on the shorter side of average and right now, he was envious of his reach. Of course, it probably didn't help that Ven was reclined on the stairs.

He lifted the second coffee up as an offering.

The part of his brain that was fixated on art observed that this would make a good painting. He'd do it in the renaisance style so he could exaggerate the way he held of the coffee, prostrated beneath the other student's shadow.

Lonely student begs for company, he'd call it.

"I'm bored out of my mind and looking for someone to watch the sunset with," Ven said. He noticed the cigarette and said, "I also carry a lighter with me."

It was a good way to meet people, carrying a lighter.

Ven watched the Tez produce a brilliant flame from his fingertips to light his cigarette. The boy's yellow eyes were fixated on the man before him. With the evening light flicking off his unusual features (was that a feather sticking out of his hair?) and the way both the sunlight and the light of the flame lit his face, Ven was....

yeah, Ven was thinking of painting again.

He said, "The husky meme has served me very well, I must admit. Anytime someone yells god damn it, moon moon, it sounds like they're memeing instead of actually getting mad at me."

He took a sip of his coffee and said, "Thank you."

Thank fucking god. Ven was going crazy without regular company. He thought being class president would keep him busy, and to some extent it had, but it didn't bring with it regular friends.

He said, "At least the moon is pretty consistent. Sun sets in the west, moon rises in the east. It shows up on time, though arguably the moon is ignoring my calls just like everyone else."

He shook his head and said, "Anyway, my brother's name is Tsun Sun, and he used to get a lot of shit for it in school, you know? Like 'what kind of name is sun sun?' kind of stuff. So I got into the habit of going by moon moon and now I just can't shake it. What about you? What kind of name is Tez? Is it short for something?"

"I don't think it sounds stupid, but I don't know if I'd be able to pronounce it," Ven confessed. He took all this information in. Tez. Aztec god. Explained the tattoos, he figured. He took a moment to think about his history. Aztecs were the ones in Mexico, right? And Mayans in South America?

He owed his history professor an apology for thinking he'd never need to know this outside of the classroom.

While Ven was not a mind reader, he was thinking much along the same lines: how could someone who was the god of not so nasty things also be the god of something as beautiful as the night sky?

Already it had turned a brilliant crimson and the stars that were splattering the landscape became more visible.

"Are you from there?" Ven asked. "Mexico? I get mistaken for Hispanic or Latino a lot. It's the skin color, I think."

The aura did explain why words were coming easier to Ven, but he shrugged. "I appreciate you telling me. I'd like to think maybe I'm the kind of person that isn't normally a dick but who knows?"

Creature. Ah. Here came the awkward spot.

"I'm a werewolf, sort of. My body doesn't turn but my spirit does or whatever. It's a pain in the ass," he said. "The full moon is meaningless in that regards but it is pretty."

Ven considered all of this and said, "So can you change them? The stars I mean?"

"Oh, huh, no shit?" Ven remarked, listening to Tez's origin story with interest. He liked this, talking with other people and learning their lives. Specifically, he liked learning about what it was that brought them here and in many ways Tez was explaining that well.

"So, forgive me for asking, but like....were these all normal boarding schools? or schools like this one?" Ven asked. He tilted his head to the side, dog like, and watched the other boy through the smoke on the end of his cigarette before Ven's eyes drifted to the sunset.

Ven loved sunsets. Every one looked different; he admired the shifting of day to night with significantly more motivation than watching night turn to day. Getting up early was not one of his strengths.

"So no changing the stars then, damn," Ven said. "My life goal is to die and eventually become a constellation. I was hoping you could make that happen before I had to die and not get to see it."

The tone of Ven's voice made it hard to tell if he was joking. Ven wasn't quite so sure. He took another sip of his coffee.

"Yeah, astral projection wolf sort of thing, and honestly, I kind of love it, but it'd be much nicer if it didn't just happen randomly and all on it's own," he said. He thought about what it might be like to travel around and dig up artifacts and have adventures, but that wasn't quite a career path he could consider. Ven needed something where he could be supervised and not collapse into someplace dangerous. Again.

"What's boarding school like? Are they all like this one? Well, sans...magic creatures I guess," Ven asked. 'I've basically gone to the same school until I came here."