nightlogs | ❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

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dan sagittarius

❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

Each year in this town, the winters seem to get harder and the summers seem to get hotter, and this was no exception. After several months of sweltering afternoons and sweaty nights, fall is finally starting to break the town’s fever, although with the cooler weather comes the death of the horseflies, leaving many of the town’s flat surfaces coated in bug carcasses. The sky is overcast, the air remains humid, and in the distance thunderstorms can be heard almost every hour of the day.

During the day, people go about their usual routines, working primarily at the slaughterhouse or mines during the weekdays, vegetating in front of the television on Saturdays, and sitting straightbacked and paranoid in the pews on Sunday, fearful less of the wrath of God than the ire of the neighbors. Evenings for the average person are filled with drinking at Nog’s or Auntie’s or peering at the TV until bedtime.

This is where our heroes find themselves, waking with a new lifestory that integrates them into this, the shitty little town.

PROMPTS

a) NOG'S

Nog's bar is the preferred haunt of most of the miners and slaughterhouse workers in this town, who meet to drink their woes away, complain about their supervisors and speculate on the personal lives of the people around them. Despite Mr. Goluboy's constant harassment, Nog has managed to keep his liquor license, and as such is one of the few successful businesses in town on account of all the stress-induced alcoholism. While one won't find fancy cocktails here, if they're just looking for a beer and some scuttlebutt, this is the place.

b) AUNTIE'S

"Auntie's" is the name of the old-school, 1950's-esque, 24-hour diner in the middle of downtown, with big red pleather booths, checkerboard floors and a jukebox. Typically, the only difference in clientele between Auntie’s and Nog's is that the people at Auntie’s wanted a burger or a stack of pancakes alongside their beer – but unlike Nog's, Auntie’s is only barely hanging on, constantly getting ticketed for waterspots on the silverware and not having enough napkins. Thankfully, one can get a full breakfast meal at Auntie's any time of day for a few dollars.

c) THE DOCKS

The town is alongside a lake, and once upon a time there was enough fish to sustain a modest fishing economy and a river that allowed for trade by boat with other nearby towns. However, with the mines' pollution, fish are no longer considered safe to eat, and only the water immediately adjacent to the springhead on the Warren Family Farm is safe to swim in. Draining from the mines has lowered the level of the river enough that it's no longer navigable. Residents will still occasionally use the lake for boating recreation, but fees at the marina keep going up (into Goluboy's pocket) and mothers are increasingly worried about letting their children get wet in that water.

d) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The other major employer, owned by Ms. Cygne. Most of the locals who don't work at the mines work at the slaughterhouse, where the work is disgusting, dreary and grueling. Sometimes people get promoted out of the trenches and into admin. Yay.

e) BIG TOP CIRCUS COFFEE

Dick's Coffeeshop is in the bottom floor of an apartment building, and many locals have no idea how it hasn't been shut down yet, given that the owner is famously generous with his resources in a way that clearly irritates the city council. Dick offers jobs to those who Goluboy and Cygne won't hire at the mines or slaughterhouse and frequently sneaks day-old pastries to the hungry. The coffeeshop is one of the few areas where artists tend to converge, usually at the weekly open mic night; however, whatever one expresses at the coffeeshop is likely to be picked up by the town gossips, mocked relentlessly, distorted and spread around.

f) THE FARMER'S MARKET

Because Mr. Goluboy's malicious prosecution of small businesses has essentially shut down any legal avenue for a farmer's market, a few of the residents of the town have established a black market for homegrown fruits and vegetables, small-batch soaps and candles, and other small products. Words gets out through a whisper network, and a few times a month everyone in the know meets in a parking lot, opens their trunk, and does some bartering and selling with each other until they get found out. Sheriff Mallard and her deputies have arrested many people at these pop-ups and confiscated their products. By now, these pop-ups have around forty people trading and selling at a time, and the city council has announced that out of concerns for food safety the sentence for being caught vending homegrown produce will be increased to a misdemeanor with jail time.

g) THE LIBRARY

The library, once well-stocked and indulgently funded, is now kept alive sheerly by the passion of the one paid librarian, Aziraphale, and the volunteers who work there. There is no interlibrary loan program and there have been no new books in years. The library is reduced to loaning damaged copies missing pages, and story hours or public events are difficult to organize due to the complete lack of resources. The city council has also forced Aziraphale to put up a sign against loitering or using the library "for any purposes besides the borrowing of books." An organization of local busybodies drops in frequently to comb through the stacks for "objectionable material," which is then destroyed at Ms. Cygne's behest.

h) WILDCARD/NEW LOCATION

Feel free to set things around town anywhere you want or make up new locations.

i) THE SPOOKY WOODS

Outside the town, there are foggy, dense woods, difficult to navigate by foot due to thickets and brambles that come up to a grown man's waist. The city council has done what they can to ban people from going into the woods, and the gruesome animal maulings are a compelling disincentive.

Note: Let the plot mods know when your characters are going into the spooky woods.

OOC DETAILS
❅ OOC Plotting: Here. More locations can be found there. You can also ask the players running the plot questions there.

❅ Event Length: This part of the plot is to establish CR and characters' roles in town. It will last about a week and half before future parts that allow the characters to start digging into the mysteries of the town.

❅ New Characters: If your character is introing at this time, assume they arrived just in time at the location the plot takes place in to be caught up in the magic drawing everyone in. They would have gotten the Man in the Moon's spiel from the welcome page right before being magically sucked in.

❅ Opt-out: Anyone that doesn't want to play in the plot can handwave their character didn't go on the mission that put the characters in the location where they were sucked in. You can thread your characters back at the Pole or send them on another smaller mission with other characters.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Does it have to be unkind, if it's the truth?" Aster is so frustrated by the company he's got to keep here, how dull and unpleasant it is, and all he wants to do for a moment is feel like someone else understands it. "They don't have to be interesting, but by the dawn, they don't try."

He shrugs about the embroidery. "I don't know. Your dad must have traveled." He doesn't even know why he says that. It seems like the thing to say in the moment. "Is it doing the job, anyway?"

"You know," Dan says. "I can't read. There's a lot of interesting information that just fully ain't available to me without assistance. The idea of having access to all that and just thinking it ain't interesting is...painful to watch."

He doesn't feel like he needs to keep that a secret. He's been seen at a the library asking for help making cardboard signs often enough. He doesn't say that his dad didn't travel, never left California and Nevada, because if Aster doesn't remember where he got the flannel then there's no point in continuing to ask. He runs his fingertips over the embroidery, thinking that if he closes his eyes, it reminds him of being back home and feeling those same flowers under his fingertips around the wood-stove and upright piano.

"It's something. I'm grateful for it. I don't handle cold well." With the extra layer, at least he doesn't have goosebumps anymore. "I didn't intend to be here past April, but here I am."

Aster starts to say 'I know,' then his brain catches up with his mouth and he remembers there's no reason for him to have assumed Dan can't read. No reason at all, for him to automatically agree that it makes sense Dan can't. Or to agree that he expected Dan not to

"I didn't know," he says. "But you would be hard pressed to find many people who get lost in a good book here, so you're not missing much in terms of conversation."

Speaking of conversation, this is the best one he's had in months, but he's not going to admit that this soon, in a jail cell.

"Just don't let the cops see it. I'd rather them not take it." He doesn't want to part with his flannel in a way parting with, say, his shorts wouldn't be as painful. "Where would you go, if you could go now?"

Insane, how much he wants to think about every place other than here.

"What are you talking about? They read the good book all the time! Ain't their fault if they miss half the messages!" Dan says with a laugh, tossing the Bible onto the floor. He feels somehow certain that Aster won't be insulted. "I won't let them take the flannel. I may have to quickly cram it back into your cell if they come by."

He lets his eyes unfocus and tries to relax a little. "I don't know. Somewhere else, anywhere else. Probably back to one of them border towns. The government took my home away so I can't go back there and there ain't no one left anyway."

So that's something else he and Aster have in common, and that makes him sad enough that it doesn't merit saying out loud.

"You ever been to Costa Rica? It's beautiful. I only ever been once, but one of those beaches sounds like paradise right about now."

"Oh." Aster lets the idea that someone else has no one left to go home to float on the surface of his awareness, sink away, infuse his thoughts with sympathy that he doesn't want to pick apart in words. He suspects Dan doesn't want to either. "Yeah. Sorry."

He can barrel along, though, with Dan dangling the carrot of another place to talk about. "I lived in Costa Rica for two months," he's happy to say. "I went hunting down a strain of heritage maize, but I ended up at the beach for two weeks after someone gave me the best pineapple I've ever tasted in my life -"

He has a whole pack of anecdotes about chasing down rare and quality agriculture in Costa Rica, wandering the mountains hammock camping, bartering for space on a farmer's truck here and there between villages. It's a lot easier to roll through those old memories, enjoying those moments of trouble and excitement and discovery and beauty in the time before he had to put his dreams away and come home to take care of a town that hates him. "If I could be anywhere else, well, I reckon that'd be high on the list," he finishes, when he's run through every story he thinks is worth telling. "What about you, was that one time enough to make you want to go back?"

Dan attentively listens to every anecdote, eyes closed and smiling at the descriptions, chuckling at the funny exchanges, continuing to rub his fingers over the embroidery. What Aster's talking about is the kind of life Dan wanted when he was younger, what he tried to approximate with drifting and odd jobs. He loved doing as much of it as he could by himself, loved it all the more when Ellie was with him. Exploring new places, meeting new people, trying new things. He lets himself get lost in the fantasy that someday he may be able to do that again.

As he lays there with the flannel and Aster's lovely voice painting pictures of jungles and beaches, he thinks that jail's never comfortable, but this is as close as it gets.

"Absolutely it was. I was looking for a kid's parents to relay that he made it to Texas safely, you know, I'm good at that, good at talking to and finding folks, and on the way back I spent a few days with a fishing village. I even considered staying there. Now I wish I had." He exhales deep. "Don't take this personal, but I'm going to try and get some sleep while I still got a bed to do it on."

It's better than on concrete. When they kick him out at six, the shakes have already set in and he doesn't have much of a chance to say goodbye to Aster, and then they don't see each other for several days. Dan doesn't show back up at the farmer's market.

Instead, he waits until he knows Aster will be working on the farm, and he shows up with the morels he offered and Aster didn't accept.

"That offer for laundry still stand?"

"Someone ought to get some," Aster says, lying back on the cot and wishing he were anywhere else in the world but this town, and barring that, in his greenhouse. He listens to Dan's anecdotes about Costa Rica, and wishes Dan had managed to stay there too.

When he's out, he's too angry to do anything but run it out, and he doesn't look for Dan around town, though it's easy to check that Dan's still living where he says he was, outside the vent at Auntie's. Aster has been checking the weather probably more carefully than Dan has, but there isn't a freeze expected, and so there's no reason for him to hunt Dan down for those answers Dan said he'd give, or insist on that laundry opportunity Dan desperately needs.

Dan does finally turn up when he's digging sweet potatoes out of the field, checking his suspicion that the field will need a crop rotation sooner than later. There's dirt up his forearms and under his nails, the taste of it still on his tongue, but he has a few sweet potatoes tucked into his arm as he detects someone on his land before he sees Dan coming through the fields.

When Dan's downwind he's handsome enough that his blue eyes strike harder than the unwashed smell of homelessness. Aster wonders if that was how he got a teenager to leave her family to travel with him, and reminds himself that he's suspicious, even if he doesn't want Dan to be the first homeless casualty this town says "good riddance" to, as it spirals into poverty.

"I don't know, you still going to come clean on your story?" Aster tosses Dan a sweet potato, just to show there isn't any malice this time either.

"I am." Dan catches the potato easily despite the fact that he partook in some liquid courage on the way here, not because he's facing Aster's judgment but merely because he needs something to loosen the way his story with Ellie has gotten tight and private and ossified. He feels like he's taken everything about that situation and kept it so close to his heart that now he has to excavate it to get it back out.

He takes a moment to appreciate the farm, which is such a nicer space than a jail cell. He knows how much work it takes to care for this land, and he's surprised Aster manages it on his own. He remembers how when he was a kid, it was his parents and him and a half-dozen other children who learned to work independently before they were fully weaned, and their land still didn't look this good.

He didn't get a chance to appreciate the Warren property the last few times he was here. He was just desperate to sneak a shower and then take off as quickly as he could to avoid having that one comfort taken away. Now he realizes that even with Aster's trust held out only conditionally, he feels more comfortable here than he does anywhere in the town proper.

Maybe if Aster believes him, they can work this land together, be up to their elbows in dirt to nurture and care for little growing things. Dan realizes that he wants Aster to offer him that opportunity.

"I need you to know that this ain't easy for me to talk about, though. And what I tell you can't never get back to nobody." He puts his shopping bag of foraged mushrooms down. "It ain't because of me. It's because I don't know where she's at and I don't want to say nothing that might could ever be used to hurt her more than she already been hurt."

"Okay." Aster figures there's no harm in keeping the story to himself. Dan isn't in danger of finding this girl again, as far as he can tell, so there's not likely anything he can tell that is a present danger to the kid. Aster tilts his head towards the house. "I'll get you a change of clothes first. Go shower."

Inside, he walks through the cold, empty house quickly as he always does, like he's trying to look at as little of the house as possible. He drifts straight to the room of the cousin who was Dan's size, near as he can figure, without thinking about it too hard, and grabs jeans, shirts, sweaters, throwing them over his arm in layers so Dan has his pick and he doesn't have to go back into a dead loved one's room again for more belongings. Back down in the greenhouse, he puts the pile of clothing on a clean towel on a worktable, thinks about putting Dan's old clothes in the washing machine, and decides to leave that to Dan when he's clean and clothed again.

The greenhouse is still warm from sun. A hammock on a stand and a folding chair with an empty tea mug by a watercolor set and a half-finished painting, brushes still out and the palette dried from last night, indicate that this might, in fact, be where Aster lives more often than his house.

He pulls up another chair and hits boil on an electric kettle, and sighs as he realizes he needs to get another mug from inside the house if he's going to offer his guest any tea.

Dan knows he probably should rush his way through the shower, get to answering Aster's questions, but now that he isn't trying to just rinse off whatever filth he can and then bolting, he finds that it's hard not to take a moment to luxuriate in the water and the smell of the soap. He scrubs and scrapes and uses the water to draw swirls and smiley faces on patches of his arms and thighs that have gotten a layer of grime caked on. He washes his hair and digs nits and dirt out of his scalp, scours his facial hair with hot water and his fingernails for any trace of lice, picks lint and dried blood from his nailbeds. He feels like he's shedding a skin like a snake. He's surprised there isn't a hollowed-out, dirty husk at the shower drain when he's finished.

He was expecting maybe an oversized shirt to cover up in while his clothes are in the machine. He didn't realize he'd be getting his pick of some clothing that mostly all fits, and looks through it wondering who it belonged to. He tries to find any trace of the person who used to own this clothing, finding a hole from a skinned knee in the jeans, dirt stains on the cuffs of one of the sweaters, and thinks of someone who must have worked this land while Aster was in Asia and Costa Rica. He chooses some clothing that fits and sets the rest aside, folded back up neatly.

"Not to ask you for more generosity, but do you might could have a first aid kit?" he asks as he comes out to join Aster, wondering if Aster's going to see him or merely the absence of whomever owned these clothes. He holds a hand out; now that they're clean and the waterlogging has peeled away several scabs, the open sores from biting his hands are angry and pink and weeping, some looking like they're courting infection. When they're settled in, he takes a seat.

"I know what it sounds like, but I swear I wouldn't could never have done nothing to hurt her. She was on the run already when I met her. She was an eleven year old in foster care and- Ellie. I should could tell you her name. Eliora. She got taken away from her parents for something violent and then she started imitating that behavior in the home they put her in and she killed another little kid living in her foster home."

And rather than face her foster parents, rather than facing "justice", she ran, and she was lucky enough to run into someone who would never consider hurting her.

"I raised her after that. I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't would turn her over to the authorities, and she didn't have no one else looking out for her. That's what I meant when I said we didn't have many good options." Dan pinches the bridge of his nose and exhales long, slow and deep, trying to let the emotion slip out rather than choke him. "And I didn't want to tell no one why she was running, just in case- just in case they ever try to prove she did it. I'd rather they think the worst of me even if it's wrong than think the worst of her."

By the time Dan steps out of the blue tarp rigged as a shower curtain over the drain in the floor of the greenhouse, Aster's gotten the other mug of tea steeping and is sitting in the folding chair with his back to Dan, drinking his own, giving Dan privacy to dry off and dress in.

When Dan shows his raw knuckles, Aster's flooded with a mix of pity and bewilderment as he recognizes that the wounds are self-inflicted, that Dan gnaws his knuckles like an animal with anxiety grooming itself raw. He doesn't get how every single way Dan wears his indignities and his sadness and his wounds bypass his logic and go straight to his soft core of empathy.

He doesn't have to go inside for the first aid kit - he just grabs the one that's stashed with the garden tools on the workbench and opens it up, looking for the things Dan's going to need, and realizing that without help all those knuckles are going to be very awkward to bandage one handed. He doesn't offer the help before he gives it, just holds out his hand with a stern look, because if Dan's going to be using his supplies, the job might as well be done correctly.

"You're going to give yourself gangrene," he mutters, unrolling bandage to place over Dan's antiseptic-doused wounds. He frowns the whole time he's bandaging Dan's hands, thinking that no matter what, this interaction's going to go poorly for him - either Dan's going to confirm that he's a child predator and Aster will have to deal with the fallout of having given a child predator any kind of comfort, or Dan will somehow successfully turn his opinion of him around and then Aster will still have to deal with the community watching him give support to an alleged predator that only he knows isn't.

No matter what, this is a bad move for him, socially. No matter what, he just doesn't see the ethical high ground in letting anyone in the community, even an alleged predator, die of exposure or infection on the streets. No matter what, the community isn't going to agree with him that his intentions are prosocial, isn't going to make it easier for him to make this place better in the long run.

This place could still turn around. He's unwilling to believe otherwise. But the course correction is proving so hard, when he feels like the only one pulling on the wheel.

They settle in and Aster's relieved when Dan's story, in an unlikely twist, makes sense. And then he's annoyed that he's relieved to hear something so awful as the tale Dan's telling. One kid from a violent home murdering another and then running from the law, ending up in the unlikely hands of someone who wouldn't hurt her - why does he find it so easy to believe Dan wouldn't hurt a kid? Why does he find it so easy to believe that Dan would meet a kid who'd committed a murder and think he could give her a second chance that the authorities wouldn't, legally, be able to, that the family of the other kid wouldn't, emotionally, be able to?

He draws his hands across his face, heaving a big sigh.

"Well, I don't think the cops ought to hear that story either," he says, slowly. "It's gonna be impossible for you to ever be anything other than an alleged child abuser in this town." When that story is so unsharable. He pauses, before he launches into problem-solving, when he can solve this problem, but solving it is going to damage his reputation even more than it already is. "I'm sorry." It feels very insufficient, but what else can he say to that? "I believe you."

And that makes him having been no better than the rest of the town, who lean as eagerly into vilifying him as he leaned into vilifying Dan.

"Thank you." Dan wasn't expecting that Aster would insist on dressing Dan's wounds, but as he winces through the application of antiseptic and hydroseal and bandages, he thinks he should have. Aster seems to have his same ingrained impulse to ease hurt, an inability to merely tune it out as not his problem. For better or worse, some part of Aster's decided that Dan's his problem, if not to solve then at least to alleviate. "I been trying to keep it clean, but..."

It's hard when he doesn't have clean places to eat or sleep or bathe, when chewing his hands is the only thing he can do to ease stress when he's out of cigarettes and drugs and booze. It's hard when this town keeps giving him so many reasons to want to distract himself from getting lost in his thoughts, and at least the rhythm of pain and damage is a break from feeling so discouraged and lonely that it's like a physical weight pressing him down into the earth.

He doesn't think he wasn't expecting Aster to believe him, but somehow, when Aster says he does Dan all but sobs. For weeks and weeks, he's felt it was either dangerous or futile to tell his side of the story, and in part that's because he doesn't think anyone would believe him, and in another part because he doesn't think anyone would understand why he made the choices he did. It was only after getting to know Aster a little better than he realized there was anyone in this town who would understand why he would choose to shelter an unrelated, underage runaway murderer, why he would come to love her like a daughter, and why the world wouldn't believe anyone would do that.

"The authorities can't never know what I know about it. She'll be an adult soon. I don't know what that'll mean for her in the legal system, wherever she is now." Dan doesn't know if that means she'll be tried as an adult, doesn't know if they successfully tied the crime back to her, doesn't understand any of it except that he last saw her when he was getting arrested and that keeping her secrets is the only way he can still protect her. "I know ain't no rehabilitating my reputation here, but I'm stuck for now. Reckon we both are."

"Do you think there's a danger she'll hurt anyone else?" Aster asks. It could be that Ellie lays low after this, that she learned her lesson, that she disconnected herself from whatever she was learning in a house so violent that it'd lead her to murder another child, but deep down, sadly, he doubts it. Dan might be able to love and create safety for a kid that troubled. The rest of the world probably can't.

But that's not the problem before them. And it's a problem he can solve - maybe.

"Can you drive?" he asks, out of nowhere. "I can't."

But there's obviously a garage on this house. A big one, that a farming family of two dozen would obviously need, for a variety of transportational needs.

"I can't leave this town too long before Goluboy - I don't know, lights my house or my fields on fire, but I could - I need to get out of here, at least for a weekend. I'll get my lawyer to check up on the place for a few days, and we can probably be at the border tomorrow if you're well rested now. You could be back in Costa Rica before the weekend's out."

He's jealous. He's so jealous. He loves this farm like anyone who lives here couldn't help but do - but the way Goluboy has tied him to it as its only defender makes it feel like a chain around his ankle, and the thought of a long drive to Mexico and Costa Rica with someone he actually wants to talk to is enough to overcome his motion sickness.

"I don't know. I don't think so, but if they sent her to a jail or something..." Dan gets quiet for a minute, bringing his hand back to look at the bandaging Aster did. It's tender work. It's tender in a way jails aren't, in a way juvie isn't, in a way that he's sure Ellie isn't getting any of, wherever she is now. He thinks over the years with him, he got her to a place where she was as well-adjusted as someone with her history of trauma could be, but he also believes that all the work they did to get her to being a social, stable person can be undone with a few unkind experiences.

He has to take a moment to breathe through the feeling of loss, the way his heart breaks that he'll never see her again, that there's nothing he can do at all that would help her from here. He's glad Aster gives him that space to collect himself.

When he looks at Aster again, there's excitement on his face for the first time in weeks. "Yeah, I can drive. I- look, wouldn't could a weekend away, seeing the heartland, be exactly what the doctor ordered for both of us? I ain't no more high maintenance than you are. We can sleep under the stars. I know some berry patches along the route here. We can make it nice."

There's such a difference between foraging for food and sleeping under the stars in this town, forced to by circumstance and stranded, and doing it with a friend because of the love of the natural world and the intoxication of freedom.

"You'd probably could be saving my life." He sighs. "I ain't saying that to pressure you. It's just what it is."

Dan's trail off does not need to be filled in. A kid who's already inclined to violence and fear isn't going to do better in jail than she did with a guardian who cared about her. Aster is inclined already to mourn Ellie's future, if she has any at all.

But they can't do anything about Ellie. They can do something about getting Dan to Costa Rica.

"Yeah, I figured. I don't want you to die." And it's pretty clear Dan will if he stays here.

The idea of sleeping under the stars in berry patches is too good to pass up. Aster can taste those berries, can feel that space around him like breathing room, finally. He has never been anything but a wanderer, and this town has stuck him in place in a way that makes him want to tear his hair out.

He stands up to pull Dan out of his chair so they can get to the garage. "No time like the present. I'll call Sam and meet you in the garage. Keys are by the door -"

One phone call to his lawyer later, Aster's in the garage with Dan's pick of the farm vehicles, with a bag full of apple turnovers and bread and butter from the farmer's market, strawberries and chocolate from his own store. "This ought to get us through the night," he says, tossing the bag in the back and hopping into the passenger seat. He hates being driven anywhere. But he hates being tied down to one place even more. "You need to get anything?"

For the first time in a long time, he feels excited about the next steps. Something interesting is finally happening, and the handful of days he can afford to have something interesting happen in look so good in front of him.

"That makes you one of the few folks in town."

While Aster goes inside to grab some food, Dan takes the initiative to walk over to the farmhouse's garage, where he makes sure that the car that makes the most sense to take - the one that isn't particularly helpful on a farm, that's clearly just for getting around, not hauling equipment or produce - is up for the journey. It's clear that Aster hasn't even touched these vehicles in a while, so Dan has to make sure the brakes work and there's enough gas to get them to the next town.

"No. There's a camp setup in the treeline near your property, just a tarp and a hammock and few other supplies. They might could come in handy at some point for someone if, you know...if things keep going the way they're going in this town." Dan, like Aster, can see the incoming wave of evictions and homelessness that'll hit this town when Goluboy and Cygne really dig their claws in. Maybe a tarp and a hammock are what he's able to give to a town he really wishes he had been able to give more to, wishes had been more able to receive what generosity he did have to offer.

For the first time in a while, Dan feels a sense of hope. He woke up this morning thinking he'd drag himself through another way shambling and crawling towards an ignominious grave, and now he may be back to the life he knows, the difficult life he's come to love, in someplace warm and new.

"Let's go. Don't reckon nobody will miss us."

"Don't reckon nobody will."

It's unbelievable that out of nowhere, Aster not only has met someone he would have missed, he's leaving town with that someone. He's been craving an adventure since before he made the worst phonecall of his life that time in the Philippines when he couldn't reach anyone here at the farm and reached out to Sam, who had to tell him the news - and now here's one, and he feels about to bust with the promise of it all.

"Hey, uh, I get carsick, if you don't mind driving careful," he mumbles, as Dan pulls out of the garage, and they make their way out of town.

The miles roll away. They put the farmland behind them, passing burnt out, overgrown skeletons of other cars that didn't make it out of town, into the winding two-lane only road out of town. The hills rise up tall around them. The woods get spookier, as a dense mist that seems to swallow light, into the trees that have already lost their leaves.

A few miles into the hill valley, something loud pops under the hood of the car and it coasts to a stop.

"We ain't in a rush. You tell if you're feeling a little green, especially since it's switchbacks on the way back. We can take breaks."

It feels good to drive again, and Dan finds himself imagining reaching over and holding Aster's hand as they drive away from this godforsaken town. He's going to miss Aster. He won't be caught dead coming back to this town that he hates, that hates him, so he's sure that this will probably be the last time he and Aster see each other. Maybe they can stay in touch, maybe Aster can come out for weekends with him whenever Dan's in this part of the continent.

Dan vaguely remembers the way that this road went, although he realizes that his memory of this place is blurry. The switchbacks seem to go on forever, and by the time the car comes to a stop the fog is so thick that Dan has to keep the headlights off to see better.

"That don't sound right." Dan sets the car in neutral. "Alright, can you help me push it to the side of the road?"

Dan's still easily fatigued from how worn down being homeless and underfed and underslept has left him. He can push the car, but even getting it a few feet in neutral wears him out.

Aster, by contrast, has no problem pushing the car, but he looks a little embarrassed at himself as he fails to know how to even open the hood of the car. His passenger rant about Goluboy's stupid McMansion suburb plan and the watershed from the hills on the farm is dead in the water, as he shoves the car to the side of the road and stands back as Dan pops the hood and opens it to find . . . nothing that Aster can identify as wrong. But the serpentine belt has broken into no less than four smoking pieces, one of which slithers out of the whole engine compartment, smoking on the shoulder of the road beneath them.

"Does that mean anything to you?" Aster asks, looking at the strips of rubber broken in the compartment. He looks around the dim woods, calculating the amount of miles they've put behind them, the amount of time til sunset.

He doesn't mind sleeping outside, but this part of the woods makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

"We got a spare for that?"

"I checked that. I checked that before we left. This don't make sense." Dan bites his lip. "I can't fix this. They probably don't even got this part in town. I don't understand how this happened."

He closes the hood and rests his elbows on it, resting his head in his hands. "I need a second."

He feels as if he was an idiot to let himself get his hopes up. He should know better by now. He let his thoughts fill up with a future in Costa Rica, a lovely weekend getting away from this cultural cesspit, of having his autonomy back again, and now they're trapped. Now that bit of hope that he had has turned out to just be yet another thing to lose, and he's losing it now.

He tries to hide that he wipes some tears of frustration away. "Okay. We can see if we can find a trail through the woods for a bit. If we don't, we can turn back and walk to town. We're only ten miles out. We can make it back."

Aster feels like he can hear Dan's hope dissipating, and he reaches out for a moment before thinking better of it, before remembering that they don't know each other that well, all things considered, that they don't know each other like that. He takes a deep breath, sighs out.

"If we just keep the road on our left we'll be fine," he agrees. They can't not get out of town. They're only a few miles from the town limits. "We can check for parts in the next town over, get a ride back to fix it and get back on the road." Turning around completely is nearly unthinkable. "We're not washed out yet." He has never given up on anything this fast, and he's not about to start.

They get on their walk alongside the road - Aster looks away from it for what seems like two steps, and all of a sudden, the woods and mist to their left are too thick to see the road anymore. The hair on the back of his neck is still standing up, but he's not willing to tell Dan it doesn't feel right in this place when that would look and sound an awful lot like cowardice.

There can't be anything to be afraid of. The worst thing they might run into is a bear, and there are two of them to ward a bear off with. The worst thing that might be following them is a cougar, and Aster keeps looking over his shoulder expecting to see one.

"Yeah. You're right." Dan can't muster up any optimism right now, so he outsources that to Aster, who seems to find it easy. It's not that Dan isn't a problem-solver. It's just that by the time he reached this shitty little town, he's had the faith that things will work out fully ground out of him, and then the town ground out his dignity too.

But he'd rather Aster not think of him as just someone who gives up when things get hard. Life's been hard, and Dan's considered giving up several times a day for years, and he hasn't done it yet. A car part isn't going to break him if losing his family didn't. This town isn't going to break him if losing his daughter didn't.

"I grew up on a farm, but I spent a lot of time in the woods growing up. I can navigate us." He digs through Aster's glove compartment and finds a compass to set a bearing, although that's difficult to do in such thick fog. He also finds himself disoriented by the way he seems to be navigating correctly, but the compass doesn't seem to agree with him, almost like every step he takes is more to the right than it looked. "Stay close."

He comes to a stop after he takes a few steps to the left to try and find the road again and finds a stream, which means they aren't anywhere near the road anymore. He isn't sure how that happened, when they're going so slowly.

"You get the sense that something don't want us to leave?" he jokes to try and cover that he's embarrassed that they're lost.

Dan's tone is joking, but Aster has been feeling a creeping sense of dread since they stepped out of their busted vehicle and took to the woods.

"Let me see that." he holds his hand out for the compass, trying to second-check Dan's calculations, and finding the same problems with the compass that Dan had.

A few more steps leads them back to the road. Aster recognizes the shell of the burnt out VW bus that is the land marker five miles out of town.

"That - that doesn't make sense. We haven't been walking for long enough to be back here."

Dread is pinpricking in his stomach. Every one of his instincts is screaming at him to take the navigational cue and go back into town. They could check the farmhouse for spare parts. They could take another car.

And yet, the very fact of feeling pushed back into the town makes him want that much harder not to go back into it.

"How many miles you think you got in you today?" he asks Dan, mindful of Dan's exhaustion. "If we just stay on the road, we can't possibly get lost." Could get hit by a car, except, the road's been so empty that it doesn't seem possible that they wouldn't hear one coming.

Dan, too, looks alarmed that they ran back into the bus that he also noted on the way out. It's simply not possible that they've walked this far, even if the switchbacks were obscenely circuitous.

"I reckon that depends on on how far you think you might could carry me." Dan winces. "I can go maybe half an hour without stopping to take breaks."

He feels embarrassed about that, too, because some part of him really thinks that having eaten some of Aster's produce and eggs and had a good shower should have replenished him back to full capacity. But instead he's just tired and stiff and hurting still.

But Aster's clear anxiety indicates to Dan that he needs to step up. Aster's already given him a lot of generosity and a lot of latitude, and the least Dan can do is dig deep into whatever pep and energy and cleverness he has and bring it to the surface.

"How far is the next town? If it's less than ten miles I'm sure I might could make it." He pats Aster on the shoulder. "Is it going to alarm you or make you feel safer to know I've had a weapon on me this whole time? Just, you know, in case an unfriendly animal comes our way."

Aster's surprised to feel what a relief it is to know that Dan's armed. A stranger with a weapon ought to make him nervous - instead, these woods do.

"No. That's a good idea. I ought to do the same." He casts his gaze around for anything suitable, picks up a fallen branch and starts testing it for hardness and durability. It isn't as good as a baseball bat or a tonfa, but it's better than a handful of nothing.

They take to the road and the fog thickens with every mile. Crows are croaking in the mist, fluttering unseen, and Aster jerks toward each sound like a startled animal, hating how hard he's having to work to keep his heart rate down with each mile ticking on. The crows calls begin drifting higher, harder, towards the arena of screeching, and when Aster looks over his shoulder the fog is so thick he almost can't see Dan as anything but a smallish blur beside him.

Every nerve of his body is suddenly flooded with alarm, like something inside him is trying to use his own voice to scream at him to run. He reaches out to take Dan's hand to get his attention, to tell him he thinks they should turn back after all, but the blur in the fog is already reaching for his hand, fingers long and sharp-nailed.

Aster yelps and jumps back. He bumps into Dan, who was standing to his other side. The figure in the mist is flanked by two others. She lunges for him, skin pale and emaciated, a thin white veil over eyes black as a sharks and a mouth open with bloody, sharpened teeth. The figures flanking her are flanked by more. No less than five lunge at them.

Aster lashes out with his branch and clocks two on the sides of their heads. They stumble and trip the others, and Aster bolts back down the road, grabbing for Dan's hand, missing, running anyway.

He cannot be here. He cannot find out what would have happened if whatever that was had touched him.

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