nightlogs | Everybody Wants to Party with You [Open/Mingle]

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dan sagittarius

Everybody Wants to Party with You [Open/Mingle]

Who: Dan and everyone – feel free to mingle with each other!
What: Dan’s turning forty and it’s party-time.
Where: The Pole
When: After Shitty Little Town, before Halloween
Warnings/Notes: Drug and alcohol use, general Dan warnings.

I. Let’s Get It Started, No More Hesitation

Dan didn’t expect to get this far. He really didn’t. He was supposed to be dead by twenty-three, and then when that milestone came and actually passed, he just assumed that the lethal profession he threw himself into would snatch him into the dark sooner rather than later. It’s only in the last few years, partnered up and with his creature needs stably met, that the horrifying possibility of a death by natural causes has entered his consciousness. It dogs him throughout the week leading up to his birthday, this looming sense that he may need to make peace with getting older, with losing his looks and physical capacity, of turning from an asset in the field to a liability.

He doesn’t want to become a burden. He knows his loved ones would rather he become a burden than prematurely become a memory, but he thinks that must be much easier to think from the other side of things. Everyone he’s close with is imbued with myth powers for now, possibility forever, and in Bunny’s case is stewarding god-like powers. Meanwhile, doing what he can to hide his heartburn and his back pain and the way his right shoulder cracks when he raises his arm above his head, Dan finds it very easy to conceive of how he’s going to be less pleasant and less fun and less capable as the decades shuffle by, and how all this time with the people he cares about will eventually become less enjoyable all around.

It would be easier to just be dead, and it bothers him all week, so he does what he does best, which is to distract himself. In this case, he’s planning a party.

He considers doing something tasteful and subdued, a nice night in with close friends and a bottle of wine and a charcuterie plate or something, then decides that those sorts of mannered engagements can be relegated to his forties. Today, he’s thirty-nine and three hundred and sixty-four days.

The yetis and Dan are quite tight at this point, and they assist with decorating the communal relaxation room with non-denominational décor, everything from paper lanterns to an inflatable bouncy castle. Dan doesn’t seem to have themed this party at all, instead just wishlisting every indulgent thing he could come up with, from a chocolate fountain to a pin-the-nose-on-the-snowman game. There’s cornhole with red and green sparkly hacky sacks, a table loaded with all sorts of cheap sugary snacks and drinks of various proofs, a photo strip booth, a karaoke machine, a bunch of Polaroid cameras, and even some fireworks for later in the evening. Technically, it’s a Halloween party, so there are cheap costumes available for those who haven’t brought their own. Phil the yeti has DJ powers.

Everyone’s invited.

II. Anybody Just Won’t Do [Closed to Bunny]

Dan knew Bunny wouldn’t be particularly keen on a rowdy party, so he set aside two days after the party for their own little date – he needed the day after the party to sleep off the hangover, and Bunny was doing a milk run in Mongolia.

He sleeps in, occasionally peeking at Bunny doing his t’ai chi but mostly just enjoying his warm bed and the smell of the tea Bunny brews, figuring he’s going to let Bunny do what Bunny does best and take control and boss him around a little. When Bunny’s talking over him, it bothers Dan, but when Bunny’s ordering Dan to have a good time and taking him out on a date and surprising him with things to do and places to see, there’s nothing he likes more. So he lets Bunny wake him up.

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"I should have expected something ridiculous." he remarks, arms crossed at the ladle-catapult Dan made for himself. He accepts the worming around his rule and meets the next one with a little more deliberation.

Eyes closed, he exhales a bit and taps his foot. Although he was tuned to his body, he relied mostly on his sight the same as any unaltered human. Removing that is what gets the first blemish on his precision.

Tossed with just a bit too much force to land perfectly, Hacky-Sack #4 clips the inner edge, slides and flops unceremoniously... eventually making it into the hole. It was far closer to a 'miss' than any of the other attempts. He'd just been skating on tracking and agility with no real practice for the game.

His face scrunches up with harmless embarrassment at hearing the ungainly slappp on wood, and tentatively opens an eye. Somehow, it's in. But it felt far more like luck.

Edited 2024-11-19 18:03 (UTC)

"Drink up," Dan says at the successful blind toss. Unlike Miguel, he doesn't care if his hacky-sacks smack the board - it's the same points one way or another. He probably could send it sailing through unobstructed for most of these throws, but he isn't trying for perfection. He's still intentionally downplaying his skill.

Still. "Reckon it might not could surprise you to know I done paid for a lot of food and gas by hustling at pool and darts."

He takes a good long look at the board to memorize the distance, closes his eyes and- it makes it in, but no more ceremoniously than Miguel's did. He drinks.

"Sometimes I dreamed about making a living in a traveling circus doing trick shots and juggling, back when I was a kid. Alright, what challenge next?"

"The bigger surprise is how you've managed to fund your monster hunting with Pool and Darts." He drinks his good amount.

What to do next - Hand stand? Longer distance? Hanging upside down crosses his mind, before figuring that'd just be petty. Or might Dan find it fun, if he also gets to handle some web? The thought lingers there. He wasn't in disguise, so it didn't have to be limited to 'normal', just... fun. That does seem to be the most '' fun '' option.

So, he makes a line of lightweb above to hang from in archetypal spidery fashion. He'd forgotten to set the drink down, but it remains in hand un-spilled somehow, tangled intuitively in the line of red.

"May as well show off now, before I drink more of these."

The fifth hacky-sack sails in to join its brethren.

"Well, not exclusively pool and darts. McDonald's do always seem to be hiring." Dan's charming enough that he can usually walk into an entry-level job just long enough to pick up a paycheck before getting fired. He figures it's also wise not to tell Miguel that sometimes he's turned tricks, flipped stolen property and dealt drugs to put money in his pocket; he doesn't imagine Miguel's ever been so near to ruin and so desperate as to find those particularly sympathetic decisions.

He scoffs at the new challenge, but Dan will try just about anything once. "If I get dropped on my head and break my neck, you're explaining this to Bunny."

By now, Dan suspects that the only way he'll win against Miguel is to outlast him with what he presumes is his superior alcohol tolerance. He waits for Miguel to get out of the web and clambers up it himself, inverting with surprising ease. Being upside down doesn't actually faze him, and he makes up for the wobbliness of the web with practiced core strength.

He tosses the hacky-sack in, then, toes pointed for elegance, brings his legs into the splits and flips himself back over to land on one foot. "I used to poledance to fund my hunting life, too. It's been a minute but the muscle memory's all there."

He takes a drink, racking his brain for something that'll actually challenge Miguel and considering proposing something he knows he himself can't manage just to add the dynamic of a miss to this game. "From on top of a yeti's shoulders."

"You won't touch the ground while I'm spotting you. Promise." he says with a bit of a smile, which manages to look mischeivous while he's hanging there on a thread.

Slipping off his web with liquid grace, he stays just out of arms reach while Dan climbs up, ready to spring if he has to. He's glad that he doesn't though, because Dan seemed rather comfortable up there without any help. Elegant, even, with his dancer's moves. He was ready to explain that Dan need only use the web, not necessarily match the position, but he finds himself pleasantly surprised with the show of acrobatics.

Fair play. He downs the last of his (somehow intact) Painkiller and raises a hand.

"Next drink, first. I'm curious about your double life as a dancing monster hunter."

Time for refills!

"We'll call it a draw for now and play a new drinking game. You know, the game where we get to know each other even better." A.k.a. shooting the breeze. Dan finishes his own drink and goes behind the table with the booze to throw together some more cocktails. He makes something fancy for each of them.

He hands the hacky-sacks to a yeti, who challenges yet another, passing the game to the next players.

"Ain't a double life. Monster hunting's always been the main gig, but ammo and gas don't pay for themselves and I do like to sleep in a motel sometimes, so I been doing any entry-level job I could might find for decades now." He wags his eyebrows and takes a drink. "Honestly, I've loved stripping. Late hours, get to perform, payment in cash, fun audience. What about you, weirdest job you ever had?"

The worrying part of him hopes he didn’t dissuade Dan from trying more sportly antics. No, best not to overthink it. It was Dan’s birthday, so Miguel will follow where he leads.

“Between the world-hopping and babysitting two hundred variants of Peter?”

Well, if he wanted ‘weird’, there is a smorgasbord to pick from.

“I’d rather babysit double that amount before navigating someone loathing you in civilian life but being fixated with you in the suit. Being the city mascot makes sure life is never boring, I’ll tell you that.”

Just thinking about how that played out made him want to drink. So, down the hatch it goes.

“The attention wasn’t always bad, though.”

"I ain't gotten to know Peter much. He got mad at me for disabling a smoke detector so I could smoke indoors, which I probably deserved." Dan laughs. "I wouldn't have could thought of you as someone who enjoys attention."

He's always just thought of Miguel as someone who resented attention, who considered managing other people's interest in him as just another distraction from what needed to be done in a competent and orderly fashion. He's long figured that Miguel sees himself less as an individual divisible from his work than as an obligated mechanism that the work is done through, and he's glad for evidence to the contrary.

"The mayor put you up to being the city mascot of Nueva York?"

Dan earns the lightest of side-eyes. It was rude to smoke up someone's place, even if the fire hazard was minimal! But he moves on to the question.

"Catching enough derailed sky-trains and burning hover cars will inspire people to put your face on things, regardless of how the mayor feels." he says lightly, figuring the current one must find him a necessary headache and a boon just like the last. Ironically, being a headache for authority figures is something of a favorite pastime.

His record as Spider-Man had gone splendidly in some sort of screwed up, inverse principle of how miserable his personal life had become. Still, he was thankful he had an escape with his other identity.

"Talking to the public was never the problem. Seeing hope in people is what convinced me to continue this when I first started."

Dan gives Miguel a smirk that those who know him well recognize as I'm married to one of the landlords and I do what I want.

"I knew you were an optimist deep down," Dan says, finishing his drink and pouring himself another. His tolerance is so high that he doesn't feel any need to pace himself, and besides, it's his birthday and if he gets wasted, it's not like the yetis won't tuck him in a warm corner to sleep it off. "It's the hope for me, too. Seeing it in others."

He finds it so hard to nurture in himself, so maybe he can get by on the hope of others, of being around it and buoyed by it like a tide, of tending to it like a garden and enjoying the fruits.

"Tell me your favorite heroing story and I'll tell you mine."

Edited 2024-11-26 09:14 (UTC)

He scoffs a little at that. An optimist?

"That's a nice way of putting it. Here I was thinking I'd started to sound like a cliché." he says, finding himself at the bottom of his drink and following Dan for another.

His body tended to process things quickly. If he was persistent, he could outpace the toxin-resistance and enjoy the onset of a pleasant buzz for a little while. It took less than one would expect for someone his size, but it didn't last too long. So he lets himself bask in the extra warmth of his face for however long he can draw it out.

"I'm interested in your dancing." he says. "We've talked plenty enough about 'heroing'. How did you get into that - the dancing?"

"Well, clichés are popular for a reason."

Dan's smile softens a little, dimmed but deepened by a wistful nostalgia. "My mom was a theater minor in college."

So the illiteracy and lack of education wasn't generational.

"We didn't have much to do during winter after chores so teaching us ballet and piano kept us busy and quiet. When I was on my own as a young man, I was looking for work and ended up in the gay club circuit and that's where I picked up dancing that was a little less...mannered." The club circuit was another good match for Dan, and he misses it. "My mother would have could been mortified. Anyway, I worked a place called the Zodiac for a few weeks and that's how I got the name Sagittarius. Everything was on-theme and someone else already took Scorpio, so I was a good sport about it."

“Ballet. That explains how you learned to do the splits. I would have never guessed that's how you ended up in a club scene.”

Miguel finds himself at an easy contentedness at the bottom of the latest drink. He feels slower, or maybe just a bit less wired to every sound around them.

“And you kept the stage name. For safety or preference?”

The question flows out easily. He doesn't appear much different, beyond losing the hawkish way he looked at Dan and at every little imperceptible thing around Dan. It was easier to focus on his words, and wonder. He was curious about how he might have ended up learning dance and piano but was never taught to read a book, somehow.

"Well, neither would have my mother could." Dan laughs. It's only in the last few years that he's been able to talk about his family at all, even more recently that he's been able to talk about them easily and casually. In part, it's because they aren't technically dead anymore. In part it's just that when he isn't scraping by in nonstop survival mode, constantly strategizing how to eat and stay warm, belittled by his peers, lonely and yet self-sabotaging and self-isolating, Dan's been able to do a little bit of healing. "I needed to get away from my real name a bit. I was trying to outrun my past, had the fool notion that changing my name would could help some."

It didn't. Improving his life took improving himself, not just changing some syllables. But he doesn't know if that's relatable to Miguel, who seems to have responded to horrible things with identifying himself further and further with the tragedy, marrying himself into them as his identity.

He drinks some more. He can tell that over time, Miguel's body language towards him has changed; Dan notices things like that. "You familiar with the club scene? I wouldn't have could taken you for it."

"Now? Not really. Not outside having to enter one for a mission."

It was his turn to be a little wistful in the face. He seems to have some awareness of the effect of the drinks, turning the empty glass absently in his fingers rather than refilling it.

"Fresh out of the Academy, though? Few obligations and plenty of Alchemax money to burn."

He's sure Dan could paint a picture of what a younger, more arrogant version of himself might look for to blow off a bit of steam. Maybe the picture is insufferable, fully isolated in a comfortable cocoon of a high-intensity career and an air of superiority. Maybe Dan would see it as more entertaining to be around, free without any sense of obligation.

"It was fun to dance. But nothing coordinated like your ballet."

Edited 2024-12-01 08:37 (UTC)

"I reckon folks were all over you." Miguel's tall, handsome, and apparently had money; Dan's sure Miguel had to beat suitors away with a stick. "I ain't much coordinated anymore. Never got more than the basic figures down. I been practicing in the workroom with Elle if you ever want some lessons, though."

He wags his eyebrows to make it clear he isn't actually trying to obligate Miguel to come do tendus with him.

"I always been curious what college is like, honestly. Or Academy, university, whatever it is. My sister always wanted to go but I think in part she was bored of being the only one that could read worth a damn." He takes a drink to cover a sigh. "Reckon it won't surprise you that I snuck into plenty of college parties, though."

"Ha. You should check if Elle would be fine with me crashing your lessons, first."

The most he's picked up between them is the sort of barely polite tolerance of convenient allies. That was all good and fine, but he's not making any attempts to reach out further than that.

His thumb fidgets over the glass, betraying a subtle guilt as he considers how much Gwen would have liked others to practice with. Then he swallows the thought, it felt enormously selfish to wallow in regrets during someone else's party - even slightly dazed as he was.

"College is a maze run of rules and metrics and hoops to jump through, so determined by your professor or whoever else. Unless you like books more than you hate structure, you'd probably want to bust yourself out in a week."

"She still mad at you for telling me off about time travel? Or y'all got other gripes with each other?" Dan can read the chilliness between the lines, and he can also see how those two personalities would have friction between them.

Miguel's next sentiment gets him laughing. "Oh, then it's a good think I couldn't never could go. Reckon I'd flunk out in a flash."

His sister would have hated it too, he thinks. The whole family can't abide rules, never could.

"Did you enjoy it, though?"

“Was she angry about that? I assumed she fashioned herself as some flavor of clever rebel and decided I’d be the bugbear authority figure.” he remarks dryly.

It was definitely every teenagers’ weird beef and not the vibe he gave off. Not at all.

At the second question, his expression sharpens through the buzz as parts of his upbringing come to him.

“The Academy schools you a lot longer than four years. You get picked up as a kid. Maybe it isn’t an equal comparison.”

Edited 2024-12-07 18:53 (UTC)

"Oh, livid. I heard her teeth grinding from a few feet away," Dan says, laughing it off. "You're lucky she left it all to Stacia on that one."

Dan raises his eyebrows. The idea repels him, but the idea of forcing a child to sit in a classroom and learn things has always filled him with a sense of suspicion, injustice and horror. He supposes, having never attended a school of any kind, that he might be prematurely judging, so he keeps the skepticism off his face.

"How young? And how do they decide which kids?"

“That explains Stacia’s sudden urge to barge into my lab.”

He sounds, at most, mildly annoyed at having his peace interrupted by the dynamic duo over there.

“Ten. You take a series of aptitude tests at the end of primary school, and then your parents decide if you get shipped off or not.”

At least, that’s how it felt. More like something that just happened to him, rather than a decision that had any input from him at all. Not that he expects ten-year-olds to know the best for their futures.

Now he needed a bit more to drink.

"Well, I done told you it was the government that shipped me off as a kid, so..." Or rather, ripped him away from his home, but Dan wants Miguel to know that while their experiences aren't one-to-one, he sees a parallel. He sees the sense of something just being done to him, of not actually having a say in the course of his own life.

Dan doesn't feel like he has any control over his life at all. Sometimes the government takes away his home. Sometimes a witch murders his family. Sometimes he wakes up in another universe.

He pours Miguel some more. "So I reckon our childhoods got that one single point of similarity. That and soccer."

He and his siblings had a soccer ball for a while. They didn't know the rules of the game, so it was mostly used to play catch and as a projectile to knock cans off of fenceposts.

Edited 2024-12-10 17:54 (UTC)

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Everybody Wants to Party with You [Open/Mingle]

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