nightlogs | Everything It Seems I Like's a Little Bit Harmful for Me [Open to All]

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Everything It Seems I Like's a Little Bit Harmful for Me [Open to All]

Who: Dan Sagittarius and you!
What: Dan tools around in the workshop and tests the limits of North's homeowner safety compliance, makes some presents for people, acts helpful.
Where: The Workshop and outdoors near the kitchen.
When: Early October
Warnings/Notes: The usual warnings associated with Dan - alcoholism, drug use, swearing, potential references to dead children, sex work and/or firearms. Lots of nicotine addiction in this one.

Dan hates the cold.

He fucking hates the cold, because his circulation has gone to shit and sucking down cigarettes all his life has left him with a permanent sensitivity to chill along with an inconvenient and unpleasant nicotine addiction, and that combination, here at the North Pole, means he has to run a regular gauntlet throughout the day to go on smoke breaks outdoors. Instead of just popping outside to take a leisurely break from whatever he's doing, he suits up with gloves and coats and hats like he's putting on armor for battle and then houses each cigarette in record time, shivering and wincing the entire time.

When he isn't on smoke breaks and isn't running around with Bunny on missions, he's recuperating from whatever adventure he's been on by working with the elves in the workshop. Dan's father was a carpenter, a tailor and a woodworker who expressed his affection in showering his wife and seven children with gifts and attention. Dan inherited that, and he fills his idle hours with woodworking and sewing, making Christmas gifts for the people at the Pole who've been pulled into this adventure, mostly practical things like warm socks and step stools, but sometimes just tchotchkes like carved effigies. He's excited that North apparently had a bevy of goose down, and is starting to piece together cozy coats for people, and he's been building various hurdles and tunnels for Cammie to test her holon on.

Throughout the day he tries to think of a way to not be colossally rude while smoking indoors. It's poor form to light up under someone's roof and make everything reek of tobacco, and it feels all the more inconsiderate to do so in the Pole, where the merriment is unilaterally pretty child-friendly in a way cigarettes are not, and even more rude to do so while the homeowner is in captivity. Still, after a particularly frozen smoke break where he returned to warmth with his hands so near-paralyzed and bone-white that it took over an hour to get back to doing his woodwork, he decides that North would be understanding, and decides to undo the smoke detector in the kitchen. After all, the kitchen is ventilated, and smoking in here just during the coldest part of the night isn't too harmful.

I. These Are Just a Couple of My Cravings

Most things in the world are made for adult men slightly taller than Dan, but most things at the Pole are made for North and the yetis, and that means Dan can't just accomplish his goals by standing on tip toes. On account of the elves constantly getting into things they shouldn't and causing accidents, the kitchen is equipped with a smoke detector, which is about eleven feet off the ground. Standing on the highest shelf of a ladder, Dan can just barely scrape the corner of it with his fingertips. His only hope of reaching it is to jump, which may be unwise, but the siren song of nicotine has been known to wreck many a man on its rocks.

"Hey, do you mind holding this ladder while I try to reach this?" he asks the next person to come in.

II. A Little Bit Sweeter

By a few days in, Dan's got a straight-up workspace in the workshop, a table festooned with the tools of his crafts. Right now, it's covered in fabric and threads and scissors and rulers and a mannequin and all the deadwood of tailoring and mending as he works on a big, puffy coat to swaddle Elle in. He's at a frustration point, because at some juncture he fucked up the circumference of the sleeves, and he's realizing that his error might be so serious as to necessitate scrapping the coat entirely. He's chewing his nails in annoyance at himself when someone comes in, and he pounces on the opportunity to distract himself with some new task.

"Hey, you need anything mended? The tailor's open for business right now."

III. So Please Be Kind If I'm a Mess

The second Dan's cigarette is burned down, he rushes back into the communal relaxation room, teeth chattering and hands tucked into his armpits. Snowflakes dot his hair, and his cheeks are flush red. He strips off his gloves, and his fingers are a mix of angry red and bloodless white. He hastens over to the fireplace and groans as the transition from too-cold to too-hot makes his hands cramp, then reaches for the rice pack he set over the fire to warm up without having to hunch over the flames.

"Oh God damn it," Dan mutters, as his clumsy-with-cold hands fumble the rice pack and drop it straight into the fire. He huffs with frustration as he gets the fire poker and tries to retrieve the rice pack, but by now the pack is decidedly on fire, looking like a burning baked potato. "I owe North some rice."

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Peter's on his way in to grab a snack. He's got about an hour to himself while May's down for a map.

"Need to replace the battery? Toss it here. I can climb up there and handle it."

“Nah, I’m disabling it.”

Dan figures he could lie, and he’s a very convincing liar, but he’s trying to start things off better here than he did in the Wilderlands. It’s only the last few years that Dan’s gotten used to having longterm relationships with groups of people; it used to be that he never got caught in his lies, because by the time they became apparent he was long gone from the picture.

He wobbles on the top step of the ladder, still straining to reach. “Temporarily. Just for fifteen minutes or so, because if I go outside right now my hands will probably fall off. I’d love a helping hand.”

[Branch was curious about the scissors and fabric. He would've wondered if he was scrapbooking if not for the mannequin.]

[(Do humans scrapbook as much as his people?)]

[Branch almost reflexively says no, because he's still used to handling a lot of things himself. Back home he spins his own wool, weaves, sews. Even now that he's back contact with the village. He still values being largely self-sufficient.]

[But he's not really in a position to say no here. He's needed new clothes, warmer than the ones he came in and at best he'd had ill fitting ones, or had to cut little dolls sweaters into cardigans with unhemmed plackets.]

[And he hasn't forgotten that day Dan and Stacia talked him down. It feels safe to ask favors of him.]

Do you think you could hem some things? Maybe do some buttons and button holes? I know how to sew and knit and weave and all that, but I don't have tools my size to work with.

[Dan grins, scooching at his workbench to leave a space for Branch to get on the table with enough space to have a wide personal bubble and an easy route to get off the table or hide behind the mannequin if he gets spooked. Just because Branch trusts him enough to ask for a small favor doesn’t mean that he trusts Dan not to hurt him, and Dan wants to be conscientious of leaving escape paths open and avoiding sudden movements.]

I can, indeed, do hems, buttons and buttonholes. [Dan pulls his tailoring glasses out of his pocket; on most people they’d be reading glasses, but Dan’s wasted on that, and so he really just uses them for detail work. Branch is small enough that just about anything is detail work.]

Show me what you want taken care of. But more importantly, which tools, exactly, are you in need of? Because we can try and make that happen too.

[Secretly, Dan would love a little stitch-and-bitch club to start up.]

Let me go get them.

[Branch runs off, swinging by his hair from the rungs of chairs and hooks on work tables. When he eventually swings back, he has several sweaters that have been made into cardigans by cutting openings in the front. The cuts are even but they're unhemmed, and don't have any zippers or buttons to fasten them closed.]

[He swings up to the work table and piles them there.]

I found some stuff that has the right proportions but I can't fit my big head through any of the neck holes so I need them to have buttons on the front. Tiny buttons, it's not easy for me to work really big human ones.

[He may need some buttons taken from other doll clothes.]

[As Dan predicted, he keeps his distance slightly, taking refuge in the open space provided.]

And for tools, just about everything? Needles, pins, seam rippers, sewing scissors, thimbles that aren't the size of a drinking cup. I know a spinning wheel is probably asking for too much, but if they can manage that so I can spin yarn, knitting and crocheting needles, too.

If they want to get real ambitious, they can also build a loom.

[That implies a lot of knowledge of fabric-craft.]

Edited 2023-10-13 04:50 (UTC)

The peaceful quiet of the Relaxation Room made it one of Miguel's favorite haunts. But even here, he wore his usual combo of nanosuit and sweater that somewhat accomodated his proportions.

So he enters, carrying a cup of his own comfort habit (the espresso in the building is surprisingly decent) and watches the unfolding scene stone-faced. There it is. A bag of rice mid-immolation. Another day, another incident of minor Pole Chaos.

Setting the mug on an end table, he lassoes the bag with a tether of laser web and tugs it out onto the stone hearth, careful to avoid getting cinders on wood.

"Let's not owe him a workshop, too."

"Thank you." Dan wasn't expecting someone to swoop in and rescue his hot pack, and he's delighted to see that the burning rice hasn't strewn everywhere. The rice bag may actually end up salvageable after all.

He crouches over the hearth, holding his hands between the fire and the rice bag, which might cool down enough to be used for its original intended purpose. He glances over at Miguel, smiling through occasional winces as the blood rushes back to his fingers. "Hi, I'm Dan. I'd offer to shake hands but mine are still about to fall off."

He gestures with his chin at the mug on the table. "You a coffee-drinker too?"

[Dan pops his glasses on when Branch returns and takes a look at the little pieces of clothing. He makes a few approving noises as he sees what Branch has worked with, but can immediately see the problem with the neck hole even before Branch explains it. He lays out the cardigans in front of him and taps his fingers to his lower lip as he considers how to approach this.

He finds something very meditative about sewing. It uses enough of his brain to crowd out some of the sad, stressed thoughts that dog his heels all day, every day. It forces him to calm himself enough to keep his hands from shaking, and since he was about sixteen, his hands have shook more often than not unless he's drunk or actively chasing some sort of zen.]

How about using beads for buttons? [He gestures with his nose to a box near Branch, where all sorts of little beads and baubles for embroidery are set aside.] Maybe we can use some of the tubular ones so you can have them catch against the button hole, but you can still slip them to the side to undo them.

[He considers the other problem of the tools. It would be nice to facilitate Branch not having to ask others for favors.]

I can probably build you a spinning wheel if you give me a few weeks. I ain't never spun thread myself but I got a great mind for mechanics. [He indicates with a flick of his gaze towards a hamster wheel-like toy he made for the elves, which is now sitting at the far end of the workbench because one elf used it to the point of running the wheel off the track, necessitating some repairs.] I might would have to could do some research on building a proper loom for you, but I wouldn't might rule it out. For little tools, I might be able to carve you some miniature knitting and crocheting needles, but anything with holes or hinges is going to be a little too small for me to do with wood.

"It's a decent enough work partner."

Now that the immediate crisis was out of the way, he gets a proper read on this stranger, the odd reds of his eyes occasionally catching firelight. All the clues hinted clearly enough that Dan had been outside for a smoke break and was having a rough time of it. Even as a less approachable type, Miguel still had that caretaker streak in him.

"There's a kettle around here for the fireplaces. What do you think of tea?"

Tea, not coffee, because Dan's voice sounded rough and Miguel assumes the cold was part of it. He didn't know yet that it's what he always sounded like.

The beads would work. And I can even show you what I need for a spinning wheel and loom. I made my own back home, but another thing I don't have in my size is woodworking tools. Or the right wood. There are bushes I used to use for lumber.

[Everything he can be handed as is is at a much larger scale including wood pieces.]

I can make all this stuff eventually but it took me a decade to make all the tools I have in the bunker. And for needles, I still usually went into town for that.

"Always willing to help. I guess something is broken, and the elves don't seem to have any tech-adepts."

Loken takes hold of the ladder without further comment, nearly able to just touch the smoke detector without any need for a ladder by himself.

Right, and that'd be harder for someone like me to replicate. [Dan threads a needle.] Pick out some beads and roll them over to me. I'll see if I might can get this working for you. I'm thinking maybe I can break down some thumbtacks to get you needles that are closer to your size, but I'd need to figure out a way to put a hole in them.

[He taps his lower lip again.]

You know, I grew up in a bunker too.

Dan's about to make an ill-advised leap for the smoke detector when he realizes just how close Loken is to reaching it by himself. He starts laughing. Dan's laugh always sounds a little bit like a garbage disposal caught on a jar lid.

"You want to just get this for me and save me the broken neck?"

[Branch goes over to root through the beads. He clearly has a preference for green. But he suddenly looks up at mention of a bunker.]

You did?

[A pause as he considers all the myriad implications of that. Had something terrible happened to him? Did he make it himself? But he said "grew up" so had his parents built it?]

[Or did he mean "grow up" the way Branch had grown up, living in the bunker from a fairly young age, but independent.]

Did you build yours?

Edited 2023-10-13 05:59 (UTC)

"I love tea. Me and my spouse actually got a special blend in the canister up on the top shelf over there. Ginger and rose and lemon verbena, good for warding off malevolent spirits where I'm from." Dan points at a bookshelf that has some odds and ends, including the canister in question, although his hand still has a claw-like appearance from the cold. "I'd be happy to share it with you."

He's observing Miguel as much as he's being observed, and making no judgments. The red eyes don't alarm him, and the gesture of kindness has provided a complicating context for the otherwise aloof posture. Dan's curious. He likes being curious, likes looking for information instead of just assuming it.

"You got a name or should I might could come up with one for you?" He sits cross-legged in front of the fireplace and starts to unwind a scarf from around his neck. It's slow going. Once he gets that off, he takes the rice pack - just now cooled enough and not-on-fire enough to be touchable - and holds the pack in his lap like a kitten, kneading his fingers into it to revive them.

Yeah, first sixteen years of my life. We had farmland and we periodically went down to a bunker whenever- well, I reckon I don't know what signs my folks were divining, but whenever we'd be safer underground that's where we went. One room, concrete walls, vent, security systems, rack of rifles, underground, canned food, whole shebang.

[Dan doesn't typically talk about his childhood. It's almost like it's something precious that he doesn't want to share with anyone else, like it'll be spoiled by people's judgment if he lets too much of it out. Most people don't take kindly to the way Dan was raised; they say things about it that hurt to hear, when Dan longs for nothing more than to go back to those halcyon days.

But it's important to build connection with people who don't yet have it. That's why he talks about going to jail with Price. That's why he talked about his daughter with Cammie. Sometimes Dan can part with a piece of his life held so tight as to be a secret if it'll give someone else a sense of common ground.]

For a bunker, it was a pretty decent setup.

[He isn't sure what "rifles" are but the rest sounds awfully familiar.]

[Branch idly fingers through the beads, not really looking now, thinking about... what?]

["We." He's thinking about the "we." About his foster parents, who wouldn't listen to him about the danger and would neither come with him nor advocate for the village to move farther from Bergentown. (Even though, in the end, he turned out to be right, the Bergens did come back.) And their acrimonous final fight, where he realized they'd never make him feel actually safe and he'd never do anything but upset them.]

[It's amicable since he rejoined village life again, but distant.]

[And he thinks about four of the best rooms that were held aside, empty. But the rare times he went into town, he never heard about his brothers passing through. So eventually those rooms became nothing special. Relegated to more storage.]

[They never came looking.]

[He filled those rooms with more supplies just like he filled his days with constant maintenance. So he could try to ignore the fact he was only surviving, not living.]

[He finally actually looks back at the beads and makes a few selections, walking them over to place them near Dan's hand and retreating again. He goes back to digging through the beads and little odds and ends, but makes it look as if he's just curious about the contents and if something might be useful.]

[It's very obviously an attempt to avoid Dan's eyes.]

Mine's a lot bigger than one room. Technically just the one level, but I burrowed out the storage rooms so I could fill them all from the elevator, so it goes down pretty deep. I live on the bottom level.

["Live." Not "lived." Present tense.]

Edited 2023-10-13 06:20 (UTC)

Well, aren’t we plush. An elevator and storage rooms. Why, I never.

[Dan imbues his ragged, awful voice with enough warmth that he hopes the comment comes across as fond and familiar, not mocking. He doesn’t have any mockery in him.

He makes it easy for Branch to avoid his eyes by starting to hem the cardigan where Branch cut it. It’s a small enough garment that it’ll be easier to do by hand than fight with a sewing machine, and Dan did always love a hand stitch.]

Sounds like you built yours yourself.

[A pause. He reflects on how Branch used the present tense.]

Do you miss it?

Edited 2023-10-13 06:34 (UTC)

[The tone is fine. The joke makes Branch snort.]

[Then he nods.]

Helped that I had a little natural bolthole to work with and part of an abandoned animal burrow but it took a while to get all the levels excavated.

[The thing is he's still proud of the bunker. Everyone thought he was crazy but he'd been right and it'd been a place the whole village had been able to shelter.]

[Still is a place where they can shelter in the future, now that he's treating it like a place he can open up during emergencies.]

Right now I'm trying to retrofit the space I have make it more comfortable for the village. I used to just maintain it for myself but I - I talk to everyone now.

[Implying that he hadn't for a while.]

So I've been trying to make sure the space can fit everyone and have the right supplies in an emergency if I need to open it up to everyone again.

[A pause.]

I do miss it. It's comfortable. [Safe.] But I miss everyone in the village more. Especially my best friend.

Edited 2023-10-13 07:00 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure my family's bunker started off as an old well or an abandoned silver mine or something. We didn't never have the equipment handy to do excavating on our own.

[Dan feels his throat tighten, and he takes a moment to compose himself by focusing on the sewing, focusing on keeping his hands from shaking. So often, he thinks he's got some sort of hook in his back, tying him to the past, and if he thinks about old beloved things too much, that hook gets yanked a little - but since he can't actually go backwards, all it does it tear him up. Thinking of home is just yanking that hook until he's nothing but bloody.

Better to focus on someone else.]

That's generous and good of you, offering up your home like that. Someone's got to do it. Folks don't realize how necessary it is until they need it. [The Sartoris bunker never kept them safe. Dan knows there's no point in saying that. If Branch finds some comfort in a bunker that worked, why should Dan offer a counterpoint in one that failed?] Who's your friend?

Edited 2023-10-13 07:01 (UTC)

[Branch isn't entirely oblivious, even with avoiding Dan's eyes he's occasionally peeked up.]

[And he wonders...]

[But he doesn't say anything. Because he's not going to ask if his family survived whatever they were hiding from when Dan hasn't asked if Branch's family had lived with him at all, despite him saying he built the bunker himself.]

Poppy. She's our queen. She's the one that convinced the Bergens to finally stop coming after us. And she helped me reconnect with everyone.

Sharing?

"You might regret that. Then we'll have to sit and chat."

But Miguel decides to indulge the offer. So far, Dan's company was inoffensive, compared to how irritating everyone else was (Jaskier.) So he gets the tea canister that smelled of ginger off the shelf and onto the same end table. Keeping things neat and orderly.

"No nicknames." is the terse answer, brows furrowed as he fills the heavy iron kettle with water. "Just Miguel is fine."

He sits squat in front of a fireplace, comfortably bendy despite his build, dangling the kettle over the heat with the metal hooks on hand. The assorted winter-themed sweater of the day is covered in holly-leaf patterns, concealing much of the nanosuit beneath. Though really, his spider-skull did not help him much in the approachability department.

Edited 2023-10-13 07:18 (UTC)

She sounds like a people person. [Dan smiles and starts to thread some beads.] So am I, if you ain't noticed. I love when I can talk folks into not giving in to their worst impulses.

[He ties off between each bead so he can do the buttons quickly and uniformly, all separate parts of the same line.]

How long did you go without connecting to nobody? Tell me if I'm asking too many questions. It just ain't every day you meet someone who knows the bunker life.

"Oh no. Sitting and chatting. Don't reckon I know how I'll survive that." Dan winks. "No nicknames it is, Miguel."

He clocks the nanosuit, although he doesn't really know what it is except that it looks like superhero stuff, which is far removed from Dan's world of rugged drifters and monsters in the wilderness and spirits caught between planes. At a certain point, tech becomes impenetrable to Dan, like sounds at too high a pitch for him to register.

"Did you arrive with that big batch of us a few weeks back? I been going on away missions, so I ain't been keeping track of who's coming or going as well as I'd like." He starts to flex and clench his hands now that they have some feeling back in them, but he keeps the rice pack smoldering in his lap.

Understatement. She is the peoplest person I've ever met.

[He shakes his head at the rest, though,]

It's okay. You're actually the only other person I've met who lived that way.

[It's also painful, how long he lived alone, but a well known around the village. Something that is just a tacit fact about you that everyone around you knows loses a little bit of any power it has.]

[He also held up well for being that alone.]

Ten years. I moved there when I was 14.

[Which implies he broke ground on it even younger.]

[He's not entirely aware of how tragic this is. If it were any other 14-year-old in the village, he'd be horrified. But he thinks he was a very self-sufficient teenager with a solid head on his shoulders when it came to having a reasonable sense of danger.]

I got back in touch a little over a year ago.

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Everything It Seems I Like's a Little Bit Harmful for Me [Open to All]

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A Little Bit Sweeter

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III its raining spiders in here

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I. These Are Just a Couple of My Cravings

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