Time Throws Us Along [Closed]

[hallelujahjunction]

Who: Dan and Elle and Stacia, Dan and Bunny
What: Dan addresses the fallout of his conversation with Miguel.
Where:
When: After Christmas
Warnings/Notes: Cocaine? Cocaine. And all the other Dan warnings.

I. Elle and Stacia

Bunny's gone on a mission for a few weeks, one that Dan can't accompany him on, and the only upside Dan can see to that is that he doesn't immediately have to tell Bunny what's bothering him. Instead, he can use their bathroom counter to do lines of cocaine, which is how he spends the evening, getting coked up and smoking his vape and hitching a ride on the sleigh to Amsterdam to party. He comes back late the next morning wearing someone else's clothes, pockets empty and hair glittered, with a hickey on his neck, and goes straight to sleep, all thoughts of dooming his home universe utterly, temporarily banished.

The downside is, of course, that the comedown from a coke binge lasts for days, and the older he gets the less he feels like he's bouncing back and the more he feels like he's crawling back up from a pit. The exhaustion is the worst of it. Dan's used to feeling full of aches and pains and hangover, but such punishing fatigue sneaks up on him, so a few days after his wild night he's sitting in the communal relaxation area, listening to an audiobook on his iPod, nursing a mug of cocoa with one hand and holding some tissue to a nosebleed with the other, when he just slips off into sleep and doesn't wake until someone nudges him.

II. Bunny

By the time Bunny gets back, Dan's ready to have a proper conversation about all this with him. He was hesitant to bring any of it up, because the emotions around saving Dan's family have always been so heightened. Somehow this happy event has also brought them to the worst arguments of their relationship more than once, has exposed every crack they have, every way they see the world and life and death differently. Dan doesn't want to suggest that they should have done anything differently when the last time he floated that idea, they fought so bitterly and painfully that Dan feels it like a wound that never quite heals.

But after talking to the girls about it and having some time and distance, he's leveled himself out (and sterilized all traces of the cocaine out of their bedroom) and prepared his little mental list of all the things he and Bunny need to catch up on. Not out of apology, but just out of gratefulness that Bunny's back, he's sewn together a new flannel for Bunny, gotten some rosepetals and candles and gussied up the bed. And then he's dressed in his coziest pajamas and settled into bed himself, ready for Bunny to come be cuddled up with and groomed and adored upon his return. He perks up when the door cracks open.

"Hey, honey. Welcome back."

Comments

[hallelujahjunction]

"I wasn't. I didn't never doubt you would."

It's so good to have Bunny home. Dan's come to accept that for as long as he lived alone, drifting place to place, he really loves having a person to reliably spend time with and talk about the day with. When Bunny's gone for long, Dan realizes that going back to just flitting between people feels lonelier than he realized back in his twenties and early thirties.

He missed Bunny enough that it feels like a taste of how terrible it would be to miss Bunny and not have the certainty that he'd come home, like life sending Dan a warning shot, but he chooses to set that aside and enjoy the moment. Bunny makes it easy to do.

Dan has his little kit of different brushes and tweezers and scissors that he uses to groom Bunny whenever Bunny comes back with more than just the usual detritus of a mission, and he pulls that out of the nightstand drawer now.

"Oh, alright. We got something to talk about, though." Dan uses the tweezers to pull out some of the embedded glass and wipes Bunny's fur with the grain. "But...when I bring up the topic, you got to understand I ain't trying to start nothing and I'm treading lightly."

[bringinghopewithme]

Bunny murmurs, glancing at Dan sideways. "That's ominous," he says, ear twitching as Dan removes the glass from his skin. He turns his arm so Dan has a better angle at the glass. "How many deep breaths should I take?"

[hallelujahjunction]

"Well, how much do you know about temporal physics?" Dan's always diligent and gentle whenever he tends to any wounds, including Bunny's. He adjusts the position of Bunny's arm and pulls another flake of glass out. "We were having a nice time, then I told Miguel about what we did with my family, about...changing time and all that, and he flipped on me and accused me of potentially dooming my world by - he said I 'gambled the stability of the universe because I couldn't swallow my own losses.'"

It stung to hear it phrased that way. Somehow, despite the way Dan was overwhelmed with shame and horror at the time, that phrase lodged like a splinter. Dan shouldn't have ever had to swallow those losses. They weren't just. That shouldn't have ever been asked of him.

"But I had a good long while to think about it." And do cocaine about it. "And I reckon he can't could possibly be right."

[bringinghopewithme]

Bunny listens quietly, holding back the nuh-uh he naturally wants to launch in with, holding back on rolling his eyes at Miguel's catastrophizing, at Miguel's insistence that somehow, Dan would be more virtuous for suffering, for not trying to make something better of what had been done to him.

Truly, Miguel's attacking him with that, not that Miguel knows him enough to realize that he was the one he ought to have been attacking. It matters more to him just now that Miguel attacked Dan at all. It matters to him, too, that Miguel attacks the very concept of not accepting that the pain the universe has to dish out to you is what a person should accept because what if the worst should happen?, and he expects that whatever Miguel's center is, it's far from being hope.

"Well I'm glad I don't have to be the first one to say so," Bunny says, dryly. "What d'you reckon, before I tell you what I think?"

Because it's so easy for him to jump straight into telling Dan what he thinks and why he's right, but he's done the work to learn how to wait for what Dan thinks before telling Dan what he's sure Dan must be thinking.

[hallelujahjunction]

Dan's secretly a little relieved that Bunny doesn't let the topic - and all their baggage around said topic - trip him up or set up any obvious preconceptions. They haven't spoken about this much at all since Dan got to have his two-minute conversation with Tab, and for Dan, at least, that's partially because of how poorly some of their earlier conversations about this have gone. Dan isn't happy with some of the methods used, even if he's been ecstatic at the results, but Miguel called the wonderful results into question and it took Dan the better part of a week to unwind that.

"I reckon..." Dan puffs out his cheeks as he exhales and thinks. "I reckon he's projecting. Everything he said made me think he only thought it was about me. I think it was about him."

Which Dan only feels comfortable speculating on because he's confident in his own ability to read between the lines and confident that Bunny has that same trust in Dan's powers of perception.

"He said ain't no way to know if I doomed my world. Ain't no way to check. He said the effect could be delayed by years." Dan sighs. "But I just came back to thinking that it wasn't about me or my world, so I don't...well, don't neither of us benefit off twisting ourselves into knots over what we can't even confirm right now."

[bringinghopewithme]

Bunny takes in a long sigh. Well, he thinks, if it's true and Dan isn't around to see it, I will be.

He doubts that would make Dan feel better, but he doubts even that Miguel is right. They did the best they could with the information available to them. Even if Miguel has insight they don't, he has no reason to believe that Miguel is infallible regarding the laws of time disruption. Miguel hasn't given him any.

If it is true, it's awful, and until it's proven one or the other, he isn't going to alter the odds by ruminating.

"Nah. Nothing to do about it just now." Not when this world has its grip on them as tight as it does, not when the crisis here is apocalyptic enough to need all their attention.

He snorts with frustration. "If there's infinite worlds besides this one, what I want to know is why it keeps calling in backup guardians that aren't other versions of us."

A little salt sneaks in that he has to work with a bossy, aggressive stranger like Miguel at all, instead of more versions of the team he already knows and works well with, where
he is the bossy, aggressive known quantity.

"D'you think this is going to make it impossible to get him to work with the group, going forward?"

[hallelujahjunction]

Nothing to be done about this now isn't the most reassuring thought in the world, but it's what they have, trapped as they are in a world that isn't either of theirs by powers they can't control. If Dan were able to just take it as reassurance, he wouldn't have started this week out with a bunch of cocaine, but now with a little distance he's able to accept it as the only comfort he'll get.

"Stacia pointed out that ripping all us from our home universes didn't seem to topple all of time, so I- I'm choosing to doubt Miguel. I know it's what I'm choosing because it makes it possible to live with myself, but ain't no use in the alternative." He gives Bunny a squeeze. He's come a long way in not panicking over things he has no control over, of not committing his heart to the worst case scenario. It's been work on both their parts.

"But...well, he might work with the others. I don't know how well Stacia and Elle are going to get along with him, because they were upset on my behalf. I reckon he was holding back in just chewing me out instead of punching my face in, so I don't think he's got an interest in ever cooperating with me again, whether it's because he's angry or because he thinks I'm untrustworthy."

It's so reassuring to be with someone who knows he's trustworthy, who hasn't doubted it in so long, who knows both his heart and competence. It makes it all the more obvious when he doesn't feel like he has that trust secured by others.