nightlogs | I'm Not the Kind of Man to Live Comfortably [Closed]

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I'm Not the Kind of Man to Live Comfortably [Closed]

Who: Dan and Bunny
What: Dan confronts a devastating tragedy.
Where: Their bedroom at the Pole.
When: Prior to Hocus Pocus
Warnings/Notes: Usual Dan warnings about potential references to substance abuse and mental illnesses, firearms, sex work, etc. In this case Dan's insane libertarian politics may come up.

It’s a bad day.

Dan has a lot of bad days - fewer, now that he isn’t slumming the single life in a stolen car and always teetering between financially under-resourced and actively ruined, now that he can regularly sleep up to four hours without interruption, now that his existence has been improved in all the many tangible and intangible ways that a loving relationship with an immortal can deliver - and today is a bad one. A tragic one, even.

It’s not the worst day. Dan’s had many days awful enough that he can’t even get out of bed, or gets hammered starting the moment he wakes up until he’s blackout drunk by noon, or starts the day off hyperventilating from a nightmare and then doesn’t catch his breath for thirty hours. It isn’t a day that bad, and he hasn’t had one that bad in a few years.

But it’s still a bad enough day that he locks himself in his and Bunny’s bedroom and slams out four straight hours of embroidery, drinks eggnog until he’s woozy, and takes a nap in the six layers he went outside to take a smoke in, leaving the top of the bed somewhat damp from snowmelt. He wakes up with no awareness of what time it is and with his hurt feelings still smarting. He does some more embroidery, gives Bunny’s favorite flannel a trail of vines and flowers going all the way down one sleeve to an ornate design on the cuff. He slams doors and cabinets, which is uncharacteristic for him. He throws his jacket and coat on the floor, also uncharacteristically. He keeps trying to nap away the pissiness without success.

It isn’t a big deal. He knows it isn’t a big deal. He knows that in the grand scheme of things, the thing bothering him is extremely small potatoes, and that he’s just perseverating on it because he’s wrapped himself into a narrative where he’s the victim of forces beyond his control and said forces are just rubbing salt in all his open wounds. He knows he’s being dramatic.

But it keeps rolling around in his head, they took my home and they took my dad and they took any car I could get my hands on and they took my cash so often I wouldn’t ever be able to might count it up and now they’re taking-, unceasing. And he knows Bunny won’t understand.

“Hey, honey.” Usually, when Bunny gets in and he’s still in bed, he greets Bunny by jumping out of bed and wrapping him in a hug before Bunny’s even finished opening the door. This time he just sits up and runs his hands over his face, then reaches for Bunny to come and sit next to him on the bed to get an embrace. “How was Mongolia?”

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He gives Bunny a squeeze back, taking comfort in his favorite person being home. With the exception of the rare few times their personalities are clashing, Bunny's presence always brightens Dan's mood. That is, however, one of the concerns Dan has right now; while the thing bothering him is small and petty, the symbolism of it is forever linked into the worst fight they ever had. There's a gash along their relationship, an open wound that never really heals, and stale marshmallows call that damage to the front of Dan's mind. He's sure if he says 'Peeps' out loud it'll come to the front of Bunny's mind, too.

"Mexico? Please and thank you. I could use some sun and adventure," he says in an easy swap to Spanish. "Tell me what's going on that I can help with."

The Pole has Dan a little stir crazy; unlike the Warren, the cold outside means that Dan mostly has to stay indoors, and after more than a few hours of that he starts to climb the walls. But staying at the Warren alone is draining in its loneliness, and Dan likes being near to the kids here, to Stacia and Elle and Cammie and Jennifer and the like. On good days, Dan's able to keep the benefits of having so many interesting people nearby and so much work to do at the forefront of his mind. On bad days, like today, all he can think about is that daylight only lasts about three hours here and his eyeballs start to freeze by the end of a smoke break.

Dan flops back onto the bed, then reaches over and rummages through the nightstand drawer for the brush he uses to release Bunny of any clumped fur anytime Bunny gets home from a mission. "I'm having a day and I don't reckon it's something you'll be able to relate to."

"No, you first," Bunny says, to Dan's tell me what's going on. "Try me. I could surprise you."

Dan is probably reasonable to expect that Bunny can't, in fact, surprise him, not about this, but Bunny ever has faith in himself.

"You want to go somewhere sunny first? Would that help?"

"Mm, looks like something got a little matted right here. I'll take care of that." Dan stalls by examining Bunny's coat, which is usually pretty immaculate but sometimes carries the telltale tangles of an adventure. He strokes the patch of fur in question and tucks the brush into his flannel pocket. He expects Bunny will take them somewhere that he won't need his jacket and coat, which are still damp from the snow from his last smoke break.

"Yeah, somewhere sunny and warm."

He makes a point of sighing dramatically, thinking that maybe if he acts out how melodramatic he feels he's being as a joke, he'll start to feel the levity of the problem. It's not a big deal. He has to tell himself it's not a big deal, and yet somehow he isn't getting his own message. "Since the California government done stolen the sunlight out of my life."

He wonders if bringing up the government will warn Bunny off from asking further. He and Bunny barely ever talk politics, and when they do, they disagree.

"Where?" Bunny demands, initially, to the accusation of matted fur before he decides Dan's just stalling, and to let him stall because at the end of the day, having his fur brushed out is not something he'll be able to get forever and he can get it now. Dan's sigh almost makes him expect a joke, but then Dan mentions the government, and nobody can make a joke to Dan about the government upsetting him without it being true. Not even Dan.

"All right, let's debrief on the beach," he suggests, tapping open a tunnel to an uninhabited island off the coast of Mexico. He's not a big fan of the beach, but it's barely dawn on the Sea of Cortez and the west-facing beach is warm with residual heat and lovely with shade.

"So the, uh. Government, huh?" Bunny asks, wondering how much of a minefield he's about to hop into.

Dan knows Bunny isn’t the biggest fan of the beach, so he gives Bunny a hug as they drop into the tunnel, an unspoken but sincerely-felt expression of gratitude that Bunny’s willing to indulge Dan when Dan’s mood is dragging and floundering. “This is perfect.”

Everything that happened to derail Dan’s life happened in such quick succession that it’s all tangled up in his head, his mother’s death and his father’s arrest and the way he was snatched away from his family home, never to return – and it’s easier to be angry at a concept than at Hepzibah. When he came face-to-face with her as a young adult, it shocked him that the person who slaughtered his family wasn’t some almighty locus of power, but a pathetic, friendless, disheveled woman in a squalid trailer, halfway to looking like a corpse, with rotting teeth and a sick array of enslaved familiars. He thought, when he was twenty-three, that he’d feel rage when he looked at her, and all he felt was pity and desperation. The only emotion that ran through him upon seeing her was a deep sadness that the amount of suffering she had to be experiencing was not enough to impart the wisdom of not spreading it around, deep, deep sadness that his family bore the weight of that unlearned lesson. And when he saw her again through a camera in Bunny’s pocket, years later, it didn’t even occur to him that he might be able to feel rage.

But the forces that took away his home and his dad didn’t have a human face. There are no haunted eyes or withered hands to move his heart, and Dan’s long since realized that he just doesn’t feel rage or fury, but he’s capable of resentment and righteousness, and he feels both of them bubble up inside him when this topic comes up.

Before returning to Bunny, he takes a moment to kick off his shoes and walk in the sand, feeling how just a half-centimeter down the warmth of the surface gives way to a secret and refreshing coolness. Dan feels like he barely ever takes his shoes off when he isn’t sleeping with Bunny. He doesn’t sleep easy enough for it, and his toes have the same propensity for chill that his fingers do. Places like this are the exception, not the rule.

The dawn, coming from behind them, turns the ocean purple and silver. Morning birds are chirping and gulls are wheeling in the air. The breeze catches sand particles and whisks them down the shoreline. A crab scrambles over Dan’s ankle. He takes a deep breath and can taste the ocean even though he can’t smell it, and all he can think is that it doesn’t make sense to try and impose order on this world. This world is so beautiful and perfect in its magnificent chaos, in its secret mathematics that humanity could spend the rest of eternity trying to decipher, and people decided what the world needed was order. Rules. Laws and their enforcement.

He knows how alone he is in this, even with Bunny. Trying to see rules and authority as anything but a threat to be recoiled from feels like trying to catch fish by hand. He and Bunny feel similarly about rules in that they don’t want to follow them and actively reject them when they’re inconvenient, but they disagree about the reasons why. Bunny rejects rules that he disagrees with because he thinks himself the exemption. Dan rejects rules he disagrees with because he thinks rules are an inherent affront.

It's a subtle difference. It doesn’t come up often, and typically, they see each other’s disregard for authority when authority is unjust or inadequate as an example of their perfect chemistry. Dan loves that Bunny does the right thing in spite of the rules; Bunny loves Dan for the same.

But their experiences of authority are different. It’s not that Bunny’s never been powerless; he has. But mostly the greatest threats to Bunny at his most vulnerable were not organized systems but individual actors, predators, murderers, rogues and aberrations to the order of the world. The most omnipresent threat to Dan has been the way the very world is organized, the barbed wire he’s had to navigate from poverty and illiteracy and addiction and that goddamned lack of paperwork, and he feels, spiritually, like he’s been cut to ribbons by the rules of society, like he’s been shredded and bleeding in a way no one wants to acknowledge because the system works for them.

They took away his Peeps. It’s just one more thing. It’s just one more small thing that he’s silly to complain about, but it’s thrown him, because he took for granted that he’d always be able to get those little sweet blobs of sugary happiness and now he feels like an idiot for having ever thought anything good could last, and he looks over at Bunny and thinks about how often they’ve had to overcome Dan’s fear of good things falling apart. Just when he was so secure in something that he didn’t even think about it anymore, didn’t even think to stress anymore, he went to the store one morning for his smokes and his liquor and his candy and it was gone.

He walks back to Bunny and takes a seat, pulling out the brush and starting to lovingly brush through Bunny’s ruff, taking time to just feel the solidity of Bunny’s body under his hands, walking himself back from the conclusion that the Peeps were an omen of everything else good falling apart. He has this good thing, this marriage, and he tells himself over and over that it isn’t going anywhere.

“The nanny state decided to ban Peeps. Something about the red dye they use to make them pink, but the cashier told me the yellow ones ain’t available no more either.” He sighs again. “It’s stupid. I’m feeling stupid to be so upset.”

He rests his forehead on Bunny’s shoulder, exhaling deep from his nose.

Edited 2023-11-02 23:29 (UTC)

"Ah -" Bunny cuts himself off from saying good on'em but he sure can't stop himself thinking it. Real hard. One less overprocessed, stale, badly textured flavorless-but-for-the-sugar bomb out there competing for attention with his quality body of work, taking up space on his day. He has to work so hard to suppress himself from smiling. "You're pretty broken up about it."

In times like these, with this specific subject, boy is it in his best interest to tread so lightly on Dan's feelings. He has had to learn so hard, so fast, to listen better than he speaks over Dan, but it's probably good Dan isn't looking at his face just now.

Dan hears the way Bunny cuts himself off, and he's torn between that feeling of grim resignation that he was right that Bunny wouldn't understand and gratitude that Bunny knew well enough to stop himself saying good or about time or I thought it'd never happen out loud. They've come a long way, Dan communicating and Bunny listening.

He makes a little groaning sound and starts to brush through Bunny's fur more, knowing he's going over the same patch again, just for the way grooming his husband grounds him.

"I reckon I had something that reliably made me happy and then they came in and took it. Just like they always do."

He hasn't mentioned to Bunny how frequently he has nightmares where the lines between dream and memory get crossed, how faces and locations get switched around, how sometimes in his dreams it's not his home in Hallelujah but the Warren he's being dragged away from, how sometimes it's Bunny in the back of a squad car.

"I didn't vote for it. No one consulted me about it, and I got to live with it, because I don't get a say."

"I'm -" Bunny considers how to be a considerate partner in this time, when Dan is deeply upset over something that doesn't matter, and is deeply upset over it because it happened in the same way as upsetting things that were and are worth being still upset about.

He resists, so hard, the urge to point out that peeps are terrible and you have access to all the better candy in the entire world, knowing now as he wouldn't have known years ago that it is about the candy, but also, really, it's not.

"Sorry this happened." He winds up to volunteer himself for a massively selfless and massively unpleasant demonstration of his deep and abiding love. "Do you want me to try and replicate them for you?"

A part of his soul curls in on itself and withers.

"I just feel powerless and- and threatened. And like I want to just cling onto you for a few hours. You know I get thrown sometimes." Like when the kids they were taking care of had a vaccine mandate to go to school, and Dan couldn't even articulate why it was upsetting him until he had a moment to untangle it for himself. He feels small in the world and voiceless and vulnerable.

"Would you might?" He sighs and then scritches Bunny at the base of his ears, trying to convey with touch that he's grateful to be listened to and respected instead of argued with and dismissed. "Can't reckon it'd be a tough recipe for you to crack."

He means it as a compliment, especially since he knows that Bunny had no love for Peeps even before they became a symbol of one of their most painful disagreements. He settles in next to Bunny in the sand and wraps his arm around Bunny's waist. "Thanks. Like I said, I know I'm being stupid about it. How was Mongolia?"

Bunny sorts through everything he's done, everything there is to do. "We have an hour or two," he says. They're already in Mexico, where he needed them to get anyway. And Mongolia drained him a little. An hour or two of cuddling will make him readier for the negotiations to come. He puts his arm around Dan, already thinking of how to get the marshmallows in the right shape, questioning where to get a sample to capture the taste correctly.

Once he gets a sample he'll be thinking of how to circumvent the styrofoam aftertaste, but that will be later.

"Mongolia went off without a hitch. Closed access off to the surface, so that portal to a hellscape is just a dirt wall. Next lava spirit I find who owes me a favor, I'll have them seal it." He does love a job done well. "The kids all made it back home to their yurts. Here's hoping Mexico goes as smooth." He nuzzles Dan's head, thinking, were the yellow ones lemon flavored? He'll have to find out. "How's the Pole? Loop me in on the newbies."

"We do have an hour or two, and I intend for Mexico to go that smooth," Dan says, shrugging off his flannel and laying it flat against the sand so they can lie down with minimal sand in Bunny's coat. He stretches out and gently pulls Bunny to spread out with him.

"Alright, well, I been a little introverted-" for Dan- "because of the weather and the cold, but I been doing my rounds with Elle and Stacia and Jennifer and Cammie, and they all seem to be doing alright. Price is here and I'm encouraging him to bond with Concrete Blonde."

Dan doesn't really want to talk too much about Price with Bunny, because Bunny tells him honestly that Dan would be better off throwing up more boundaries, and Dan doesn't want to listen to that sound advice.

"Met a fellow named Miguel who might be a bit...well, he's one of those world-on-his-shoulders types, and I reckon it's sucking him dry, because he just seems tired and like the kind of tired that makes you more impatient with folks than you'd prefer. Just based on what I observed in a chance encounter."

"Reckon he's not going to get a lot of evidence that he should relax here," Bunny sighs, knowing that the members of the pole have been dealing with plenty of threats that he hasn't had time for, while he's been off dealing with ones they don't have time for. "Think he's headed for a burnout, or will he find some balance before that?"

Talking about Miguel is more engaging than dealing with Price still being here, and Bunny makes a "hmf" sound over Price's presence at all. "You trust him around the horse?" he asks, lightly, because Price has been known to hurt Dan for attention, let alone an animal Dan loves.

"I reckon he's headed for burnout. I'm going to keep an eye on him, but I suspect that he ain't going to take kindly to feeling babysat, so I got to be careful." Miguel told Dan several times that his patience for Dan was both exceptional and easy to retract, that Dan was one of the few people who managed to stay on Miguel's good side for more than a few minutes. Dan doesn't want to prove Miguel's patience misplaced.

He frowns as they circle back to Price. "No, I don't, really, but if I keep shutting Price out as untrustworthy he's going to sink to those expectations. The powers that be keep sticking him with us. I keep thinking it's like I keep getting a chance to finally figure out what works to keep Price stable."

Dan knows it's not his job, but who else will do it without him? Jennifer? Aziraphale, maybe? He returns, over and over, to that image of a young Price freezing in the streets, wondering why no one would take care of him, and Dan's heart is too tender not to respond to the way that memory lingers in his head.

"Keep me posted when he seems close. I'll find a milk run to put him on or something. Make him go do diplomacy for the Valencians, they always show a guy a good time after the work's done." If Miguel needs a break, Bunny's sure he can drum up one that looks like work, even if he has to ask some fair folk to pretend they're building towards a rumble.

He stays quiet over Price. "I know he does that, sinks to expectations, but I haven't seen him do much rising when given the opportunity." But maybe he's just salty because he can't figure out how to get Price to respond positively to anything he says and does, no matter how patient he tries to be. "He can't hurt the yetis, but I hope the elves are giving him a wide berth."

He cannot, will not, forget how Dan's fever raged after Price pushed him, already injured, into the river, and acted like he was the injured party committing self defense over it.

"I need to get this same set of updates from Stacia soon. I asked her to keep the werewolves in a pack. She doing all right?" he asks, because he'd always rather move on from Price as soon as Price is brought up.

"I'll do just that. Honestly, I wouldn't might mind going on a milk run with him, getting to know how he responds under stress that ain't what he's put on himself. I still ain't nailed down a hypothesis on whether he'll be a good partner under pressure."

Dan could see Miguel being the most competent one in the room or being the one who loses sight of the big picture just as easily. He would need to observe in action to come down to a firm conclusion, and he'd rather do that in a relatively easy situation than a truly dangerous one.

"Plus, he got a great ass. Almost as nice as yours." Dan grins and gives Bunny's haunch a pat. He gives a grunt to the comment about the elves. He's been doing his best to tell them to just not get too close to Price, but it's hard to do so without poisoning the well, and Dan figures that well is on the way to being toxic sludge at this rate.

"Stacia? She...yeah, she's alright. Told me some alarming shit about her world and her past and..." And they can't change what's already happened to these kids they've come to care for. They can't go back and untraumatize Stacia.

"Well let me know when you do nail it down," Bunny says, because a lose cannon that might be highly competent but might also be deeply brittle is better understood sooner rather than later. "Have I mentioned how glad I am to have you around to do that?"

He smiles about Dan's ass comment, but hardly wants to be making commentary on some other mortal he hasn't met, even though he is fully ready to assume his anything is better than most people's.

"Is her past weighing her down?" he asks, of Stacia, because he's aware Dan knows that he knows Stacia's world is a fustercluck of trauma that they can't undo for her. Maybe they'll get lucky and be able to attend to it sooner than later, but right now, the problem in front of them is managing this crisis in this world with these overworked kids. "How's she handling command?"

"You have, but I can always stand to hear it." It's not that Dan does what he does for the praise, nor does he need it to motivate him, but after so many decades of having his skills and talents taken for granted, the fact that Bunny recognizes and values them always warms Dan's heart.

He draws in the sand with his fingers. "She's fine. I'm fine, which is what I could tell both of us were worried about when she told me what she'd done been through. Reckon she thought I'd cut and run again like I almost did last time."

Stacia's forgiven Dan for that; Dan will too, in time, but it may take him a little longer.

"I told her that if she wants to avoid going back to her world, you and me would might find a way to make that happen, but more than anything, it sounds like the idea of never growing up scares her. Which makes sense. She don't want to be trapped as seventeen years old forever like she'd have to resign herself to here."

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I'm Not the Kind of Man to Live Comfortably [Closed]

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