nightlogs | Time Throws Us Along [Closed]

Entry tags:

Time Throws Us Along [Closed]

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."

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

"Hey Elle, does Isaac still keep coke in his pockets as an intimidation tactic?" Stacia asks as she and Elle sit down oh-so-casually on either side of Dan. She figures that it's kind to let him wake up first before they launch into the what happened and who do we have to menace portion of the conversation. Because he looks like hell and that is entirely unacceptable.

"Because I saw him once pull a baggie out of his coat and ask someone if they really wanted to go," she continues. Because she's not sure that Isaac has ever de-escalated a situation in his life.

Elle sighs deeply at the question. "It's spiritually awakened. Someone at the caern started growing it himself for personal use. It was a whole thing."

She tucks her legs under herself and gently rests her hand on Dan.

"I don't think he does it much, but he's always got some on him."

She starts petting him softly as both a comfort and a gentle stimulation to help him start waking up properly.

Dan startles when woken, even this tired, and in one quick motion pulls his earbuds out and reaches for his holster, but stops when he sees who it is. He exhales and melts back into the armchair.

"Cocaine bear," he murmurs, rubbing his eyes and recalling Elle's cocaine story that she told him way back in the Wilderlands when he was in much worse shape than he is now. "What's the difference between spiritually awakened coke and bog standard coke?"

He had been hoping that no one would catch wise to what he was up to, but he supposes that even if the scent's too old to be picked up, the fact that his nosebleed starts again when he bumps his nose with his hand would make it obvious. He sits up and tilts his head forward to let it drain into the wadded-up tissue. When it feels a bit more stuffed up, he leans back into Elle's petting.

"Y'all gonna tell Bunny?" He isn't going to ask them not to. He doesn't want to ask either of them to lie, and he knows they wouldn't listen to him if he tried to force them.

Edited 2024-01-21 06:36 (UTC)

"Of course he does," Stacia says of Isaac, rolling her eyes. She respects him as someone who's made it to his forties in a very dangerous spiritual calling, but he's still ridiculous.

"Spiritually awakened coke turbo-charges our Rage," she explains, because she has decided that Dan is allowed to ask these sorts of questions and get answers instead of sass. Elle can fight with her about it later if she wants, but Stacia's pretty sure she won't. "Which means doing more violence even faster, because clearly we don't do enough of that when completely sober."

She prefers spirit awakened pot herself.

As for Dan's second question, she cocks her head to the side.

"Do we need to tell Bunny?" she asks, gentle and non-judgmental. Dan doing coke isn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a symptom of the actual problem.

Usually the cold of the pole is deeply unappealing, but Bunny's been underground close enough to the Earth's mantle for such a long time that the cold is a balm for once. His fur is matted and singed, fully burned off in patches, where there isn't black glass still embedded in his fur.

But he's alive and victorious and he smells the roses before he reaches the door. "Aren't you a sight for sore eyes," he says, shutting the door hard and leaping into bed. "I won, in case you were wondering."

That shortens a long story, so that he can stretch out and get assisted getting the glass out of his fur. Getting groomed and adored is a major perk of marriage.

When Bunny's a little cleaned up, he smooths his paw over Dan's hair and settles in to be relaxed for the first time in weeks. "How's it been here?" he asks, stretching his arm out so Dan can help him with a bit of embedded glass on the inside of his forearm.

"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."

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?"

Elle's tone is defeated as she confirms Dan's thought. "Cocaine bear."

The information Stacia shares gets a side-glance, but no real reaction. She already decided Dan gets to know this stuff, too. She just didn't know Stacia's stance on it until now.

"It can also provide a big boost of bloodthirsty hyperactivity. Especially when you explode a whole brick of it into your face."

She opens her mouth respond to Dan's question, but Stacia beats her to the punch-- with exactly what she was going to say.

The pressure of her hand gets a bit firmer now that Dan's awake.

"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."

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.

"You can't be surprised that I'm curious what it does to a normal human." Dan would prefer to think of that then about a bunch of teenagers goaded, chemically or not, into lethal, traumatizing violence. He knows not thinking about it doesn't change it. He knows what these girls have waiting for them back at home, what they keep encountering on their missions, are a fact of life far beyond his capacity to change, and so he glances at Elle's arm to see if it's still a stump, but he doesn't want to linger on it for now.

He sighs and rustles around to turn off his iPod. "No. It's alright. I'm going to talk to him. I ain't planning on dodging around."

Which is quite the testament to how much effort Dan's been putting in to fight his impulses to be avoidant and withdrawn about things that upset him, which these girls, more than anyone except Bunny, must be aware of.

"Y'all know Miguel O'Hara?"

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."

Stacia makes a mental note to follow up on "cocaine bear" later, because that sounds like a thing and she likes to be included in things.

"I'm not 100% sure, but I think it would just be regular coke to a normal person," she says. "It's more about us and the way our magic works than the coke or the alcohol or whatever. Unless you know more, Elle?"

She beams and rewards Dan with a hand squeeze when he confirms that he's going to talk to Bunny about this. That's a huge step for him, and she's thrilled to see it.

Then he brings up Miguel and she sighs. She's not sure what he did, but it's certainly going to make her want to smack him upside the head.

"Seven feet tall, fancy spandex, bossy as hell even though it's not as cute as when I do it?" she says. "Yeah, I know him."

Elle's other arm on her far side, so Dan can't see that it's still missing. More importantly, Stacia isn't being forced to see it every time she looks in Elle's direction.

"Not really, I wasn't the one messing with that stuff."

Dan's willingness to talk to his husband gets a soft smile, but her expression drops when he brings up Miguel.

"Good planner, bad boss," is her addition.

Dan pretends he didn't try to peek at all at Elle's stump by reaching for the box of tissues to continue babying his much-abused sinuses.

"Well, I like him, but I don't disagree with neither of them assessments and I reckon he don't much like me anymore." He sighs again. He isn't sure where to start, because he finds most of the terrible things in his past so hard to talk about, and even the victory of having righted the timeline and spared his family is now something so difficult to force out. As much as he hates when they get their memories broadcasted, he suspects neither Stacia nor Elle would have much of a handle at all on the specifics of his background otherwise.

"Well, ah. You know science ain't my strong suit. It do seem to be his area of expertise." Dan chews on his thumb as he blocks his nose, and somehow, the combination of slightly gummy consonants and some induced nasality makes his awful-sounding voice even more unpleasant-sounding. "I don't reckon I've told y'all about everything that happened before- before the Wilderlands. My family was..."

They both know, everyone in this room knows and yet Dan finds it so hard to get out in words. "We were cursed and that's how they all- that's how we- anyway. A witch offered me the opportunity to sell my past and future to go back in time and save them."

And of course Dan accepted.

"That didn't fly with Bunny, for obvious reasons. So me and Bunny stole a time travel device from the Rig and gave my family the warning to go on the run instead of stick around and wait to be cursed. We went back seven years later - time works different between dimensions, I reckon, because it was only a few months for me and Bunny - I mentioned that to Miguel and he lost it at me, telling me that I might could have..."

Dan's voice gets hollow, like he's still processing the enormity of what he might have done. "-doomed my universe by destabilizing the timeline."

Billions of people. Trillions upon trillions of living things. Dan can's even wrap his head around it. "So I did a bunch of coke about it. And vodka. Christ, my hangover lasted two days and I'm still in a comedown, obviously."

Edited 2024-01-22 07:58 (UTC)

It's a good thing in this case that Dan's nervous gnawing and abused nose make his terrible voice even worse, because coping with the sounds makes the words themselves less immediate. And Stacia needs the distance right now, because the problem with being an empathetic Gaian shifter is that other people's pain is upsetting. Especially when it's someone you already care about. And Stacia has to wrangle not just her own reaction, but keep an eye on Elle's in case she needs to haul Dan out of claw range and send Elle to fight a chair.

She locks eyes on Elle and flexes her fingers as she allows Dan's words to pass over her in their fits and starts, prepared for Elle to react as poorly as Stacia herself might otherwise.

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?"

Elle's expressions grows more blank as Dan explains. Her hand is paused mid-stroke. There's twitching in her jaw as she clenches her teeth.

She's heard parts of Dan's story before, but Miguel's response... Deep breaths.

She slowly removes her hand from Dan and rests it in her lap. Her nails dig into the palm of her hand. Her fists trembles with contained rage. She isn't making eye contact, just staring forward and attempting to keep her composure.

"Fuck that," Elle snarls. Her tone is venomous and far more aggressive than she would normally allow.

She isn't at risk for a Frenzy-- yet, but she glances at Stacia to make sure the Shadow Lord is prepared. Just in case.

Dan was expecting, perhaps, some anger directed his way. He feels, at best, unforgivably ignorant, like he allowed his desperation to undo what happened to his family and his technological illiteracy to stop him from asking the necessary questions. And he feels like he's in a middle of a free fall, like he's levitating in limbo without knowing if he actually did cause such a horrific tragedy, but like he'll inevitably, awfully hit the ground.

He was expecting, maybe, understanding and sympathy. But he wan't expecting anger on his behalf, and he sits up and starts to twist pieces of tissue into plugs for his nose now that the worst of the bleeding has settled.

"It's alright, he-" Dan is good at keeping himself even-keeled even when those around him are furious, and that's where he is now. "He didn't do nothing wrong by telling me, most folks would be furious with me and rightly so, I just- I didn't know. I wouldn't never have run that risk if I did knew."

Stacia nods in acknowledgement of Elle's eye-contact, then turns (most) of her attention back to Dan and his situation.

"Hokay," she says, spreading her fingers wide and pressing her palms together to help keep her focused. "I also do not have a background in, like, time travel or reality science or whatever, but I'm pretty sure that traveling backward in time to save your family in particular doesn't do nearly much damage to a universe as was done to the universe the Rig was in. Right? That universe was completely fucked by what they did to it with the go-away bombs, but the cracks were only big enough for a comparative handful of people to show up from other realities."

Stacia's been trying not to drop F-bombs in Santa's workshop, but this is well worth the risk of getting dinged for language on the naughty-nice scale.

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.

Edited 2024-01-25 03:31 (UTC)

"I, personally, think it's pretty fucked up of him to assume that just because shit works one way in his universe-- or multi-verse, or whatever-- that that's how it must work everywhere. I think he has no right to accuse you of causing that kind of harm without knowing more."

Elle's voice is forcibly even but incredibly tense. Her shoulders are trembling.

Your readings are off, Miguel had told her. He said that she should look out for 'glitching', because thats what happens to anomalies.

"It's one thing to investigate if there might be an issue, but to tell you that-" she cuts her self off in disgust.

"...I ain't considered that," he says to Stacia

Dan feels like his thoughts have all been cotton-y ever since he found out, like he can't hear himself think over a roar of anxiety and humiliation and guilt and confusion and shame and grief and- and defensiveness, all in a whirl. He notices Elle trembling. He notices Stacia's hands. He knows right now that the question isn't what they're going to do about this problem but what the problem is, the accusation or its contents.

"I couldn't not try to save them but I wouldn't have never risked that many people." He's sure they understand. He knows they know how bad it was to lose his family, how the trajectory of his life curves around that and how every negative pattern in his brain leads down that gully into that swamp of grief. "But I reckon he could have might suggested getting more information before leaping to the worst."

He's willing to give Miguel plenty of grace. It's in his nature.

Edited 2024-01-27 01:11 (UTC)

"In his defense," Stacia says with a pointed look at Elle, "he did tell me that he was a reality repair person, and I imagine that's a job with some trauma involved."

Much like, oh, anything involving the supernatural.

"But yes, he absolutely should have asked some questions before jumping to the worst." She snaps her fingers. "And, as bonus evidence, a witch had already offered you a time-travel solution! It was already on the table as an option. She wouldn't have offered it if it were going to break your reality, which she also lives in, right?"

Stacia's pointed look gets returned. "That's a reason, not an excuse."

Elle's not about to say she's capable of being objective about this particular subject, but she does try to keep her damage from becoming other peoples' problem, when possible.

"I know someone who has experienced with fucked up timelines and alternate realities. From the little he's told me I don't think total-universe-destruction is assured. I can't say how it works in the world you changed, but if nothing else it shows that Miguel's rules aren't multi-versal."

Isaac is famously reticent, but she's picked things up over the years. She knows that he remembers his life from a reality that no longer exists, and that it's fucked him up more than he'd care to admit.

"You may not be the only one here who's done something to alter their timeline or reality. This may not be an isolated incident-- it could happen again to someone else."

It's her, Elle's the one who's altered her reality, but she's not going to share that with the class. There's still the possibility that other people have as well.

She catches Stacia's eye again, this time to get some reassurance that they're going to figure out a way to handle Miguel. Even if they don't plan it right this second, it needs to happen.

Dan exhales. It feels like unlacing a too-tight sneaker, the way he finally feels like he can fully breathe now that there are theories in front of him that feel factually sensible, not just self-servingly exculpatory.

"He's going to want to lay down a blanket rule against people taking up offers to change their pasts." He exhales again and crumples up his bloody tissue and tucks it into his pocket. "If the stakes could might be that high, I see where he's coming from."

But it's sounding like the stakes aren't that high, or at least, aren't that high certainly. Bless these girls. Bless them that they both got heart and brains.

Dan suddenly laughs quietly to himself. "I always just been some guy. It don't make sense for me to hold world-ending power."

Stacia opens her mouth to argue back with Elle that what she means is that Miguel may have a reason to be stupid and thus might not need to be physically slammed into a few walls, but then snaps it shut and breathes through her nose. Not the point, she and Elle can argue about who's going to handle the Miguel portion of this problem later. Right now, they're dealing with Dan.

"Yeah, well, I want to put all the werewolves back home in a hamster ball and shake them until the stupid falls out," she says. "Miguel can want things all he likes, and he's welcome to politely explain why messing with our own pasts might be a bad idea, but he's not the boss of this gang of misfits. He made an attempt at being mister bossy-pants, and I declared him team secretary instead."

Dan probably saw Miguel's big information-organizing announcement, but she's not sure if he saw the responses. Given Dan's general Dan-ness, it's entirely possible he buried it under a pillow and did something else until everyone else stopped talking. So, you know, just making things clear for him.

The laugh is a relief, and Stacia smiles into it. She also declines to argue with the logic behind it -- again not the point here.

"Yeah, I don't think anyone wants that kind of pressure on them," she says.

Elle takes another deep breath and rubs her hand over her face. Stacia visibly holding her tongue reminds her that she should probably do the same.

"Yeah, no one was taking his attempt seriously. We even got backup from people who had worked with him before on why it might not be a good idea. I think he gets that that's not gonna fly here but it may take him a bit to transition and act accordingly, especially if he's used to being the boss."

She has more to say, but none of it would be productive right now. Dan needs to be able to realize that the situation may not be what he thought, Elle and Stacia need to figure out how to deal with Miguel, and Elle needs to keep her shit together long enough to get through all of this.

She takes another deep breath, trying to release some of the tension she's holding in her body (and burying some of her anger deep in her gut to be dealt with Later), and places her hand back on Dan to continue the soft petting she was doing before.

Dan lets himself be pet and resists the urge to return the gesture, because he worries it might be more uncomfortable for Elle to feel observed in her anger than just politely ignoring how tense she's become.

"He listened to me and accepted that I wouldn't might be cooperating none with his efforts to organize. I told him it was a personal sticking point for me, and honestly, I reckoned he'd push back harder on me, but..." Dan shrugs. He actually addressed this issue directly instead of just dipping and passively objecting. "Maybe y'all prepared him for the potential he'd have a libertarian in his midst when you demoted him to secretary. I don't know. I reckoned we were doing real nice until I mentioned the timeline."

He makes a gesture like something exploding and falling to pieces with one hand.

"I didn't mean to drag y'all into this. It's fine. I'll be fine."

Stacia blinks in momentary surprise, then grins and pats Dan's hand. Look at that, personal growth! Good job, Dan! "Well, it's not like I'm big on taking orders either: I just take advice and sometimes requests from people I've decided are worth listening to."

Then, since she's already touching his hand, she takes it in both of her own. "To be fair, you didn't drag us into this so much as not try to run when we cornered you while you slept. Which, frankly, would have been a perfectly logical choice. So thank you for letting us help."

"No one here has any authority over me and if they try to order me around I will simply bite them."

She's only partially joking, but the lightening mood lets some of the tension bleed from her posture.

"That includes you. You didn't drag us into anything."

Sorry, Dan, the reason they're getting involved isn't because of any pressure or obligation-- they just care about you.

"I can give information. I can share and cooperate. I just can't fall in line." He gives Stacia's hand a squeeze. He's glad they understand, glad that not only do they understand but that they also feel the same way. None of them feel the capacity to bending the knee to authority; it's not even that they don't want to, but that all three of them feel compelled against just rolling over, like it's something in their constitution.

"And I know better than to run from y'all. You're both faster than me." He laughs, then yawns and sits up, gathering the tissues and his other accoutrements. "Mind accompanying me back to my room and dropping me off? I'm still so tired I might fall asleep in the hallway if I go it alone."

Stacia giggles because while fleeing would have been an understandable impulse, it certainly wouldn't have been successful overall. Even if they didn't immediately give chase as though he were a squirrel, they would have hunted him down in other ways. But they didn't have to, because Dan politely acquiesced!

"Yeah, sure," she says, standing up herself. "The bed's going to be a comfier place to recover than a chair. You set for snacks and water and stuff?"

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Time Throws Us Along [Closed]

I. Elle and Stacia

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject