nightlogs | I Had Nothing to Say on Christmas Day When You Threw All Your Clothes in the Snow [Closed]

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I Had Nothing to Say on Christmas Day When You Threw All Your Clothes in the Snow [Closed]

Who: Dan and Miguel
What: Miguel finds out something concerning about Dan.
Where: The workshop.
When: After Christmas.
Warnings/Notes: Dan's crazy politics in the forefront; probable references to dead kids and substance abuse.

Miguel did, in fact, get a sky-blue and white puzzle box for Christmas, wrapped with corresponding paper and left outside his door on the morning of the holiday itself. The locking mechanism is different than the one he observed Dan making. Dan has, as the march of time has inevitably drawn him closer to the time of year he struggles with the most, been doing everything he can to stay busy, and that means each box has been individualized and has been a grounds for experimentation. Such intensive work brought Dan right up to Christmas Eve making and wrapping gifts, which was perfect; in stressing about getting boxes in hands, he didn't have much time for gloominess or panic or working himself up in hypotheticals about how everything's going to go wrong somehow.

But now the holiday's over, and aside from New Year's Eve, there isn't anything to distract him. He's taken back to chewing on his hands, and after he accidentally bites hard enough on one of his fingers to leave a blue moon-shaped bruise under his nail, he decides to do something about it.

He's noticed, of course, that there are some people here at the Pole who don't fit into standard-sized clothing, and that that limits their options for warm clothing. The myth powers may buffer people a little bit, but Dan's seen enough people have their powers dampened or switched up on them to think it's wise to entirely eschew a wardrobe of layers. And he's been intending to talk to Miguel ever since he somewhat rudely ignored the hell out of that last attempt Miguel made to rally the new myths into organizing.

After having asked around and gotten a sense of when Miguel might be available - when Dan won't be interrupting some important Work, which he knows is important to Miguel - Dan knocks on Miguel's bedroom door with a messenger's bag over his shoulder.

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"Just your fine self. I'll take care'it." Dan's so evidently jazzed at the idea of introducing Miguel and Concrete Blonde and then getting to work on Miguel's outfit. Dan often feels like happiness is something that needs to be pounced on, some elusive thing he can barely hold onto; all these things to do feels like a handhold to grip this wonderful, slippery thing called joy. "Maybe put a sweater over the sparkly stuff. God only knows how her horse eyes pick up light."

Maybe Miguel would know how to look that up, how horses process visual information. That sort of trivia seems like the kind of thing one could find in a computer.

A few hours later, Dan waits for Miguel in the stables, where Concrete Blonde has her own private stall amongst the reindeer. The stables have the unmistakable smell of livestock, which Dan finds deeply nostalgic but which he knows many find unpleasant, and he hopes Miguel can tolerate it - but either way, he has the barn door cracked, so he's bundled up in a few layers. He has his tools for Concrete Blonde nearby, the farrying tools and a brush and a Ziploc bag full of apple slices and alfalfa. Her reins and saddle are hung with care over the edge of the stall.

Concrete Blonde is a large dun mare with a Christmas-print blanket over her back. Unlike the reindeer, who seem a bit shy, she doesn't seem perturbed by Miguel at all. She flicks her ears and raises her head to sniff in his direction with muted curiosity, then regains interest in the apples Dan's offering her.

"Welcome to my happy place," Dan greets Miguel with. He looks more at ease than Miguel's likely to have seen him; if Miguel loses himself in working on high-level scientific analysis, Dan loses himself in good old-fashioned farmwork. "So, you ain't never been around horses, or around big animals in general?"

Miguel is standing... very cautiously at the door of the stable. Trying to avoid staring too much into the horse's eyes. He didn't get along particularly well with the reindeer and mostly avoids this place. The strong scent doesn't help. His nose was not as sensitive as his vision, but it was on the attuned side. It stank, and it was a different kind of stink to anything in Nueva York, even in the dredges of the oldest parts of Downtown.

The outfit change was casual enough - he foregoes the nanotech insulation of his suit for a thick coat and a scarf. The wool scarf, at least, wasn't hampered by sizing and was tied in a slightly fancy tucked style. His brief span of Horse Research convinced him to stick to fabric rather than anything with blinky lights.

"...There was a Spider that had one. He didn't bring the Horse into my lab."

He thinks Dan would like Web-Slinger, what with his guns, horse, and his Wild West cowboy attitude.

"I brought tea. For the cold."

In his hands was a very tall thermos filled with tea. Dan didn't tell him to bring anything, but it felt odd to come empty handed. So. Tea.

He's going to just stand there, unless Dan invites him into the Happy Place.

"Thank you. That's very kind of you." Dan takes the thermos of tea and cuddles it to his chest. Even though he's wearing gloves, his hands are a bit clumsy from the cold anyway. It's a price he pays for using the stables and being around his horse. "Alright, before you get up close, you ought to know that even though she's a very calm horse, you don't never want to make loud noises or move too quickly around them. And don't stand behind her, because the last thing you want to do is get kicked by a horse. I did as a kid and it broke my collarbone."

He gestures that Miguel can come in, showing where to stand in front of Concrete Blonde so she can see him throughout. He takes a sip from the thermos and makes a satisfied sound, then pulls another apple from the bag. The horse follows along with her nose, trying to clip her teeth at the slice, but Dan is old-hat at keeping his fingers clear of her.

"So, I figured you can feed her and help me groom her a little, get her used to you. We don't never know if someday we may need to fight side by side, and odds are I'll be on horseback, so it'll help if you both know how to be around each other." Maybe this is the sort of information Miguel was hoping to get, that Dan is hoping to give, that they've just had a mismatch between soliciting and providing.

Dan makes an entirely salient point that coaxes him to come in and try his chances. Yes, this was very relevant. Better that he get over this discomfort here than out on the field.

So, with a deep breath that left a visible vapor trail through his mouth and nostrils, he enters the stable. He does his best to tamp down the instinct to fix his eyes on the Horse to try and read her mood. The swivel of ears and swoosh of the tail didn't really give him much to work with, anyway. As he gets closer, he notices that Horses were a little warmer than humans. Like a cat or dog.

"Hating loud noises is something we share in common, then."

A furtive glance at her head. The dark, equine eyes belied... nothing. The humor could only be appreciated by him and Dan. His shoulders stiffen as he notices the too-human teeth at the end of her long snout attempting to take nibbles of apple. It was silly. Dan was in far more danger from the Horse than he was, and yet...

"How quickly is too quickly?"

Overthinking it a bit, maybe. He manages to make it next to Dan without anything catastrophic happening. It did satisfy him to see his small gesture bring Dan some comfort and warmth. It should give him some more time to continue this activity he clearly enjoyed.

"And.. should I wear gloves?" The question hits him as the bristly pads of his fingertips and palms touch each other. Between that and the concealed talons, he wonders if the Horse would perceive this as Wrong enough to be alarmed about.

"I jump out of my skin at loud noises, so that makes three of us." But, in the interest of sharing information, Dan taps his fingertips to his left ear. "But I can't hear that good on this side. Too much firearm action in my life. I gotten better at not startling when folks approach from this side but it took time."

Dan's interactions with the horse have the same sort of fluid confidence as how he pours a drink. Every gesture is intentional but unconscious in that same way. "No faster than how fast I'm moving. Here, if you hold your hand like this, she won't accidentally clip your fingers."

He demonstrates with some apple, slice on the flat of his palm. He gets a glance at Miguel's hands. He's been trying to be covert, assessing the differences in Miguel's body, and he got a decent view of them while taking measurements. "I'm only wearing these because of my circulation issue. Your hands are fine."

Her body language is liable to be inscrutable to Miguel, but Dan can tell from the way she's more interested in the snacks than the company, from the direction of her ears, from the pace of her wide sides moving with her breath, the free movement of her tail, that she isn't particularly bothered by Miguel. And he can tell by Miguel's discomfort that he might do well to translate all that. He's pieced together that either Miguel isn't completely comfortable with his own physiology or that he at least anticipates that others will be.

"Normally someone your size might make her a bit wary, but just keep following my lead and she'll stay calm. I don't know if she's got a sense of character or if she can notice things about folks I can't, but she's got good instincts about people." Dan pets her and makes little noises to her, then nods to Miguel. "Palm up. I'll give you some apple for her."

He follows along, noting the details that Dan was sharing.

“The suit filters out noise that might be overwhelming. But outside of it, the migraines can get bad - especially in the daylight.”

He floats some more information. Throwing out lines to see if they can make a strategy for each other.

The chitchat distracts him from his initial discomfort with the Horse. If he were by himself, he probably would have walked out at this point. No need to push his luck with a Large Animal that had some kind of sixth sense for people’s character.

He offers his bare palm, gingerly. Aside from the different texture of the gripping surfaces, there was a faint shimmer of color when the light caught them at the right angle. His talons were completely hidden, with the only hint being light lines that might be easily missed or mistaken for old scars.

He looks fixed watching Concrete Blonde’s muzzle, noticing the whiskers and other odd details, and watching for signs of her trying to get more than just apple.

"Migraines? That's nasty. Do you prefer it nocturnal? I do. My ideal schedule is four in the afternoon to six in the morning, but unfortunately don't the rest of the world run on my circadian rhythm." Dan sees what Miguel is going for, and he's open to that, a little tit-for-tat of dropping details, knowing all the while he can shut down, claim the horse is getting agitated, and end the conversation. "Probably we'll end up running across each other a lot if we keep the same schedule."

Concrete Blonde sniffs and huffs at Miguel's hand and wrist, but without any intent to bite, just to investigate. Aside from mouthing his palm as she takes the apple, she doesn't touch him.

"Your hands are beautiful," Dan says. "Mine are all jacked up, but even before I wrecked them, they didn't glimmer like that."

He hopes Miguel can tell the appreciation is genuine. There isn't a trace of condescension. He really does note the differences from human hands with an eye for finding beauty in what's unique or unusual. It's the same skill that allows him to so quickly see the virtues in monsters and menaces, an openness to switch his perspective about what's good and lovely.

“There isn’t much of a rhythm when it’s always dark-”

His train of thought is interrupted by the brush of Concrete Blonde sniffing his palm. It looks like he was the more nervous one of the interaction! But he will brave this Horse Eating an Apple and acclimate to the new sensation.

And then the earnest compliment throws him completely off guard, in a way that makes him forget that the horse was even there. His eyebrows slacken. It was one of the kindest things that had ever been lobbed at him, by someone he was still getting to know properly.

Then, a little sadness tempers it. Miguel sees his hands and can only think of the bloodied palms from the first night they changed, through the filter of his distorted vision. Of swiping and desperately grasping and finding torn meat dangling from his fingers. Of the way his flesh splits open when the hooks of black chitin are released, stretching skin into unnatural ridged patterns where tendon and muscle tensed against the bone.

He supposes Dan could have that gotten his nicer impression from a first, mistaken glance.

“It’s just a trick of the light.” he says, feeling a little extra warmth in his face. He might have rattled off something about iridescence in tarantula tarsal pads were it not for the creature currently investigating his hand.

“Her nose is… soft.”

Being as smooth as low-grit sandpaper, over here. He remembers from his Horse Research that Horses liked to be pet on the snout, so he dares himself to give Concrete Blonde a small rub in the center.

"Mm." Dan peels off one of his gloves and flexes his hand in the light. His knuckles and fingernails are usually some sort of chewed-up and scabbed - a bad habit of his - but even aside from that, there's scar tissue in all sorts of patterns over his, bite marks both animal and his own, gunpowder burns, singed fingertips, lacerations on the back for blood sacrifices, various cuts and scrapes from woodworking and tailoring and fixing cars. There's enough scar tissue that plenty of it's pearly. "Well, if it's just a trick of the light, reckon mine do glimmer a bit too. But not as much."

He tucks his hand back into his glove before the cold gets to him and drinks some more tea. May as well normalize that lovely is lovely, however it was come by, however strange it may be.

"Here, like this." Dan demonstrates where to pet her, how hard. Concrete Blonde nickers, and it sounds almost like a deep, breathy purr. She pushes her nose into Dan's hand, then into Miguel's, like she's trying to decide who's going to give her the best stroke. Dan's familiar to her, but like her master - and unlike most horses - she has a taste for novelty, and she doesn't find the texture of Miguel's hand disagreeable.

He briefly feels comfortable enough to look away from Concrete Blonde's muzzle to get a glimpse. The scars on Dan's knuckles were noticed the first time they met, but talking about it makes him pay more attention to all the ways it was marked by the years. It was like a novella written on his body, where more layers of the story were revealed the more glances he got.

Trying to avoid staring, Miguel occupies himself with trying to glean anything from the Horse's face while the topic falls away. He always felt a little strange talking about his own body, and didn't feel the urge to ask Dan about his.

"That's a good noise, I'm assuming...?"

He has pet a cat before, where pushing back and purring were usually indications of affection. He adjusts to more closely imitate Dan's demonstration, adding a light scritchy-scratchy motion that agreed with the sensitive side of his fingertips. Soft and furry. He learns in the moment that Horses have very long eyelashes and eye-whiskers. In a sort of clinical way, he wonders if those were used to detect bugs.

"Very. Horses only got a few vocalizations they make, and this is the best one." Dan passes Miguel another slice of apple to give her. "It means she feels at ease. Optimistic, if you might could characterize a horse having that sort of attitude."

Dan likes to think he's optimistic. The older he gets, the more he thinks it's less optimism and more opportunism, an ability to exploit fissures in the dark to let light in. He's always braced for the worst, always prepared to lose and fold into the defensive, always so tired of getting through each day, but he also feels like the world is just abundant with treasures and joys. He believes in potential for change and innate goodness and the worthiness of all things, and that must be optimism of a sort.

Horses, too, live in fear. They're prey animals built for panic and suited to see everything as a threat, but they're still cooperative, social and capable of surprising gentleness. Maybe, even without the nostalgia, that's why Dan likes them so much.

"I've heard they do therapy with horses. If a horse is calm, it's easier to believe ain't nothing dangerous around, since they pick up on danger faster than most humans do." He knows Miguel doesn't find her relaxing the same way Dan does, but that's why he tries to explain it. "If she ain't scared, odds are good I don't got to be either."

"I haven't made a terrible first impression, then."

The second apple offering is presented with more confidence, now that he knows she didn't mind him. He wonders what might be going on in her head as she nibbles at his palm. Did she see him as a different species, or as a funny variation of a human? She didn't see him as a danger, at least.

Their earlier conversaton hangs in the air as Dan explains his interest and the comfort he feels from spending time in here. Miguel gets the impression that Dan relates to the flighty nature of the horse, and how it might be easier to relax when a second pair of eyes was in charge of being the lookout. There is a reason swarm behavior is successful in the animal world. One can find safety in numbers.

He also considers the gamut of self-destructive habits that Dan had hinted at up until this point. He was an adult, so Miguel isn't going to lecture him on his decisions. He still thinks he prefers seeing Dan here with his Horse and his Tea rather than getting lost under a bottle. And for that reason, maybe he will learn to acclimate to being here in the stables.

"Did you name her? Or did she come with it?"

Edited 2023-12-31 20:35 (UTC)

"Nah, you've got her quite at ease."

Concrete Blonde finishes off the apple and immediately begins pressing her snout into Miguel's hand again, either urging him to give her more snacks or give her more pets. Dan gets her comb out of his kit. He'll take the tangles from her mane and then brush the dust off her hide.

With two other living things - the horse and Miguel - with better senses than him, Dan does find himself able to relax in a way he can't on his own. He feels that way with Bunny, too, knowing Bunny can sense danger more quickly. It doesn't dispel the clouds of depression and sense of doom, but it does soothe the base part of the limbic system, the part of Dan's hypervigilance that's more about avoiding saber-toothed tigers than about impromptu funerals.

"Concrete Blonde. It was Ellie's favorite band." Dan doesn't even attempt to hum any of their signature songs, but the riff to Tomorrow, Wendy rings in his head like church bells. He unknots a mat that's started to develop in her mane. "Sometimes I can't tell none if I don't want to think of her at all or if I want to never think of anything else."

He's sure Miguel can relate.

“It's your way of remembering. Maybe it is somewhere in the middle.”

The answer comes with a gentle, but morose honesty. There was a span where Dan caught him willing to be more open with his own grief, but the door is shut more tightly now. Mostly because Miguel didn’t want to get trapped in a tar pit of his own emotions. But he did understand the double-edged sword of nostalgic memories that hurt all the while.

“I'm sorry to tell you that I'm out of apple.” He addresses Miss Concrete nudging his hand. Miguel talks to animals the same way he would talk to a person.

She will get more pets as she demands as a compensation prize. The feathery brush of the dry adhesion must feel like a tiny comb, sifting though the short fur of her snout with his fingertips. The cling was too weak to hold him up without his talons, but it still helped him along. He ruffles out the static paths drawn into the fur with a gentle scratch of (human) nails.

He glances over to Dan's mane-brushing.

"Do you need help with the grooming?"

"Reckon she'll forgive you." Dan considers giving Concrete Blonde some of the alfalfa in his bag, but then decides that it's more important for her to bond with people that aren't him and Price, and lets her continue to get her nose scratched.

"Yeah, take that brush and move with the grain of her hair." Gift-giving is Dan's most obvious love language, but taking care is probably the dominant one. He brushes his horse, grooms his husband's fur, used to braid his daughter's hair in a hundred different patterns. He does that now, twining a lock of Concrete Blonde's hair into a complicated braid he's done a thousand times. "You can lift the blanket. She just gets cold easier than some horses. I reckon she comes from the desert, like me."

Dan knows that this isn't a space or activity Miguel would be doing if Dan hadn't asked him or, for that matter, if Dan hadn't built up some goodwill. He recognizes it. "Thanks for coming out here with me. It's nice to be able to share this."

He can't ask Miguel to share more about Miguel's work, he figures, because he simply can't keep up with it mentally.

The fingers of his idle hand tense in a loose, clawlike fist as he looks at the brush, forgetting for a moment that he had neither suit nor spinnerets to web it over. Right. No blinky lights around the Horse. He catches Dan braiding her hair as he goes to physically pick it up, and makes note the urge to tend to others.

"You seemed very excited about it. I was curious."

In a way, the goodwill smoothed over their earlier conversation as well. He can tell Dan will want to care for his cohorts as best he can, and that lets him feel a little better about bending the rules. It was still in the spirit of what he was trying to accomplish.

The acclimation to the sounds and smells of the Stables isn't too bad, all things considered. He picks up on Concrete Blonde's scent face-to-face with her broad side, with all its particular notes. That will be helpful too, out on the field. Folding the blanket over so that it sits in a neat roll over her hindquarters, he starts to brush out the loose hair, starting at the neck and shoulders. The dust seems to tickle his nose in a different way...

"Curiosity's one of my favorite traits in a person." Dan doesn't say that like he's flirting, but with the simple appreciation one would use to opine about a sunset. It's one of his favorite traits about himself, too. Curiosity has always served him so much better than judgment. "Careful, don't stand behind her in case she kicks. Always to her side."

She doesn't seem to have the same interest in being groomed as she does getting treats, but she doesn't seem at all unhappy at the attention as she lets Dan and Miguel brush and comb her and as she nibbles from her hanger of hay. Dan's using this as an opportunity to give her an abbreviated examination, too, reaching under her blanket to palpate her ribs, stroking her withers. He wonders if she's even capable of having a health condition, now that she seems to be the repository for his myth magic, but it does his heart good to make sure, and after a moment he explains.

"I'm just giving her a bit of a checkup. Muscle tone, fur thickness, all that. I do field medicine, but when I was a kid my parents started me off on giving medical care to animals on the farm, catching calves and the like." Very different than Nueva York, it seems like. "Been a few times with these folks I've needed to bust out my wound care skills."

It's relevant to the information Miguel wants, he figures.

Miguel does pay attention, keeping his grooming to the front of the Horse's body, but there's a fourth element in the midst of all this that's distracting him as Dan speaks. He does his best to supress it, but he was too outside his element to really succeed.

With little warning, a loud sneeze is muffled into his sleeve. The undignified grimace betrays the long points of the upper canines. It doesn't have the nearly same effect as when they're bared to attack. When his eyes dart to Concrete Blonde's head, expecting the worst, he finds the horse unbothered. Aware that he was the one making noise, if the pointed ears were any indication. This settles his nerves, some.

“Field medicine- ” he starts, covering his nose and working through unhappy sinuses as he regains the usual confidence in his voice. He could catch the hints of floating strands of fur in the light… he will have to get used to it.

“Then, no veterinarians or doctors nearby. It sounds like the farm was pretty isolated.”

He resumes combing when the discomfort fades.

"Salud." Dan smiles at how unbothered Concrete Blonde is. He gives her another slice of apple to reinforce the calm behavior. He doesn't point out that he thinks it's cute when Miguel's fangs pop out. "Yeah, real isolated. I saw folks I wasn't related to once, twice a year at most, when my dad needed an extra set of hands to go get supplies in town that we couldn't rustle up on our own, equipment and sugar and the like."

Dan's a little hesitant to share this with people, because usually people default straight to telling him that his upbringing sounds terrible and depriving. Dan doesn't want to hear that. That was the happiest Dan's ever been, and now that his mind has been permanently mangled by trauma and violence, he thinks it's by far the happiest he'll ever have been.

"We were trying to stay off the grid and out of the clutches of the federal government. Up until we got caught out when I was a teenager, weren't no one but a few folks the town over who even knew we existed."

And maybe if Dan gives all this context, people won't need to ask him why he responds to authority as strongly as he does. He didn't grow up taking orders or following any rules besides the common-sense ones his parents implemented for safety, which he was always free to question. He never benefited from the protections of law enforcement or the social safety net. He was free and happy and one day a man in uniform held a gun to his face and told him he wasn't allowed to be anymore, for the good of society.

Dan's a social person. He cares about others. He cares about and tends to his community. But "society" - he doesn't believe that concept has anything to offer him. That's for other people, made by other people, like a religion he doesn't share but keeps getting evangelized about to.

"...Gracias." he mumbles it out automatically while he had hand over nose, not incapable of a nicety here or there.

By nature of a lot of things, Miguel tends not to really voice his opinion about upbringings. His wasn't great, and it would quickly become grating to receive Remarks about it. The events are in the past, anyway. Not like whatever it is Dan went through that left him traumatized and illiterate could be changed retroactively.

"Hiding from the government? I'm going to assume to stay that out of sights it had to be related to the supernatural."

The former half of the equation doesn't phase him at all. There are plenty of reasons to want to remain off-grid (or to hide in plain sight). It's why he had his alter-ego, it's why rebellions formed in secret. But he was starting to put two-and-two together - so Dan's family was out there somewhere, and lost that small world of comfort when they were found. And it seemed to have upended the trajectory of his life altogether.

He glances over Concrete Blonde's withers, tone light: "Could be my bias. My encounters with magic and its practicioners are usually out of sight to the world at large."

"Yes and no. We didn't need nothing supernatural to want to keep the law off us."

The tragedies that drove Allie and Lewis Sartoris underground were petty and mundane: a drafted sibling lost to an unjust war; a shootout with the police; abuse left unchecked because the perpetrator was a friend of the sheriff; carcinogens leeching off the Air Force base into the water supply; the goddamn local theater getting torn down and turned into an off-ramp for the highway. These unremarkable injustices just kept piling up until Lewis and his new bride decided that the only way to protect the baby growing inside her was to go off the grid and throw off the society they'd come to see as shackles. So they did. So that's what Dan grew up with.

Dan sees these injustices all the time. He doesn't understand why no one else seems to see them, why they see prisons and borders and armies and taxes as things that just are, laws as natural as that of gravity, not the creations of man. They're fictions that people breathe life into and they fail to see their own role in it. They can't think of a world without those things they've been tricked into thinking are necessities.

So Dan holds his tongue and thinks very carefully about how to explain his situation to Miguel. To be too fiery will be to squander the goodwill they've built together; to be too tender will be to get sucked into the heartache. He braids another lock of Concrete Blonde's mane, and as if she could sense his heaviness - maybe she can - she presses the side of her neck into his shoulder to maximize physical contact.

"We just wanted to be left alone and free. That's all. We weren't bothering nobody, didn't never hurt no one, but we did get caught out, and that's when my folks started dabbling in dark magic, and then everything just went to shit." He almost swallows the last four words, because he doesn't want to explain the details of how awful things got. They've both seen so much death. No need to summon it to the surface of this conversation. "Anyway. I can't do magic. No one in my family could. Can. Well, my middle sister can, but she's the only one of a family of nine."

He's still getting used to the idea that they're alive out there, that he and Bunny rewrote time itself to spare them. They're past-tense in his head, present-tense in reality.

"We did some messing with the timeline to prevent most of that, though. I'm just getting used to remembering it's real."

He is patient as Dan wrestles with and comes to share the details of his life and his family. Despite his stern demeanor, Miguel seemed relatively tolerant and accepting of it. Even the mention of ‘dark magic’. He monitored an entire network of dimensions - one man with a bone to pick with the society he grew up in wasn’t such a strange story to hear. In fact, it tended to come with the territory the moment you had to work around and undermine the systems one existed in by pure chance.

That is, until the last detail. The idle brushing stops, the handle caught in a tense grip.

It’s hard. Miguel had to adjust so much of his standards and expectations on arrival to fit this new world. And it tested his patience more than he’d ever tolerate back home, but he’d managed to keep it relatively put together. He’d managed.

With this, he can’t stop his voice from rising with what feels like hot coals lodged in his chest.

“What do you mean ‘messing with the timeline’? You don’t just mess with time.”

Unlike society, ‘the timeline’ did have its physical laws and forces, ones he had painfully suffered under. Dan didn’t seem to catch the horrifying implication of what he just admitted.

Miguel just… wants to give it a chance. One desperate chance to somehow amend what was just said.

Dan's eyes are on Concrete Blonde, but he hears the rise in Miguel's voice so clearly that he doesn't need to look at Miguel's face. He knows he tripped some sort of wire. He keeps his own body language calm, wondering if this is about to escalate and, if so, if the horse will be a buffering factor.

He looks over at Miguel, but his hands continue braiding. "We used a time travel device and went back and gave them the warning to clear out before a curse kicked into effect."

A dim sort of horror lurks at the back of his mind as he thinks back over the experts they consulted, a wage worker on the Rig and an evil witch herself. Hardly reliable, but at the time Dan believed the risk was his alone to incur, his or the already-dead of his family.

"The original option was to erase myself from time entirely. That was the deal the witch put on the table for me. Bunny didn't accept that option, so we did it our way."

“Your way.”

The words are repeated, slowly. It was probably good that Dan was looking at Concrete Blonde’s mane instead of catching the look of disgust on his face.

He can’t do this. The emotion in his throat was going to quickly reach its boiling point, and he knows he isn’t going to be stopped by a horse, if properly motivated.

Expression dark, he storms out of the stall. The brush is dropped somewhere by the doorframe. He was making space, back turned, keeping his gaze on a crack in the wooden door instead of on Dan. He soothes himself with a slow, ineffective rub of the temple.

“Neither of you considered just leaving it well enough alone?”

He tries not to growl out the question. The last thing he wanted was a repeat of the last time he had this conversation.

“You didn’t think about what would happen if sticking your hand in could have disastrous consequences outside of just your existence?”

A dull voice in his head floats the idea of just leaving. Leaving altogether. If he keeps speaking, he’s going to start to say harsher things that he’ll regret later.

"I-I didn't-" Dan places a hand to Concrete Blonde's snout as Miguel storms out, as she snorts and flicks her tail in dislike for the sudden movement of another large, living thing around her.

He doesn't speak immediately. He holds back on what leaving well enough alone meant, when for Dan it was never "well enough" - it was the better part of a decade on the run, burying loved ones in shallow graves, watching the people he loved die in unspeakably cruel ways, it was the tragedy that uprooted Dan's brain like a kitchen drawer full of silverware being dumped onto the floor, it was the sort of evil and unfairness that shouldn't exist in a just world - because it's sinking in what Miguel means.

"What kind of consequences? The technician we talked to said the worst that'd happen was I'd get erased." Dan makes sure Concrete Blonde is calm before he steps out of the stall, but he gives Miguel as much space as the stables allows without running over to the other end of them. After a moment, he crouches down to pick up the brush. "What risk did I run?"

It isn't a rhetorical question. It's one step shy of what have I done?. Dan didn't know there were disastrous consequences for other people that he was flirting with. He didn't know, but he also didn't push hard to find out; the idea of having hope dangled in front of him just to watch it burn up was too painful to investigate, so when Gretchen told him he had nothing to worry about, he was eager to believe it. He isn't a scientist or a magician. Why would he turn down the best news he's ever heard over a possibility no one told him was a possibility?

And yet the idea that he rolled the dice with people besides him and his family and Bunny feels like ice water in his blood. He feels himself short of breath and counts beats on his inhale-and-exhale to regulate himself back.

I Had Nothing to Say on Christmas Day When You Threw All Your Clothes in the Snow [Closed]

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cw for some body horror / blood mention

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