Participants:
| Scene Title | Equal Trade |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Two people who absolutely have their shit together meet to talk about those very facts while the city is on the verge of a premeditated arson attempt. |
| Date | June 26, 2021 |
Seeking: living sounding board. Offering: living sounding board.
Trade location: Dirty Pool, 1PM.
The Dirty Pool Pub is a dark place by default, but its worn down, black, chipped-paint interior isn't even lit, today.
And why would it be? The sky is damn near black, the air stinks of chemicals and distant smoke, and Bruce - the bar's owner - has long elected to go on a well deserved prolonged break from his duties. The last thing he did was push all the furniture to one side of the main room, piling flipped chairs and stools up on the tables.
The windows remain unboarded, giving anyone who might think of breaking in for some booze a clear view of nearly empty shelves, save for the occasional, colourful dregs in tipped over bottles. Not that it matters at the present anyway, since the door's been left opened just a crack by someone who still has the keys to this place.
That person being Zachery, who is also tipped over, in a black pea coat, just lying down in the middle of the cleared floor amongst remaining cigarette butts and stray bits of poorly swept up broken glass, staring up at a stain on the ceiling.
It's been a while since they've been here. A good while, on Emily's part. She stops in surprise when pushing the door open there are no brusque, burly men crowding the place. It even smells different in here, unoccupied as it is, and the fact that it seems like the owner has prepared for the worst and left in advance, it… well…
Maybe it makes her feel a little better. Makes her feel a little less insane for wanting to do the same.
Emily lets the bell-less door close again behind her, shutting out the sound and smoke of the street, and pulls down the surgery-grade mask she's been wearing lately while out to try and filter the smoke and whatever is being carried within it. Her footsteps are quiet as she makes her way over, eyes going over the health hazard she finds the ground to be with more even clarity after she pushes her sunglasses up to rest on top of her head.
"Normally this is the kind of thing where I'd join you, but I think you might be stuck to that floor if you try to get up," she opens with wry in her voice. "I might be in trouble regardless, with it being kind of standing room only in here."
Emily pauses at Zachery's shoulder, looking down at him in a way that doesn't block his view of the ceiling, but certainly occupies it. Her head tilts. "How we doing, rubber duck? Assuming you finished healing up well enough, since I don't think Nicole would be both around to have helped you get here and letting you lay out like this."
"You could sit on the bar," Zachery replies a few seconds before his eye lands on Emily's face, the socket next to it empty. "Bar birds get a drink for free." He lifts his arms in an awkwardly ground-bound 'don't look at me, I didn't make it up' gesture, pulling a face to match.
"Also, I'm resting, clearly." He lets his arms fall back onto the ground with a thwump, fingertips resting on grime. "In my favourite bar, with no people distractions." One hand comes back up for the laziest point at Emily. "Except for you. You get a pass. Don't know why. Stopped questioning it."
Emily pulls a face at the mention of bar birds, just as Zachery knew she would, his own nearly matching. They were just like that, it seems. She sighs the look away, peering down at him instead. There's always something a little viscerally unsettling when he doesn't wear his fake eye. There's also something to be said about a lack of its presence maybe serving as a sign of his overall well-being.
"Kind of the world to conspire for once on our behalf so you can get both the bar and lack of people all at the same time," she supposes. She shoves her hands into the pockets of the windbreaker she has on, one that pulls double duty as a rain jacket. "Seems like an opportunity we shouldn't take for granted."
She looks up and over the shoved furniture once more, moving to go and snake herself free one of the questionably-cushioned barstools. "How the fuck, by the way," Emily asks as she yanks one such chair out of the pile at the moment of expletive emphasis, "Did we end up in a position where a fucking wildfire is still out of control like this despite all the rain? Despite weeks and weeks of it?"
"It's a fucking nightmare, is what it is," she declares as she flips the chair over and gently settles it down on the ground a conversationally-appropriate distance from Zachery. "It's one I'm checking out of, I think."
"Surprised you're still around, if I'm honest." Zachery drags himself up onto an elbow to look at what Emily's up to, and ultimately just twists himself up into sitting up on the filthy floor, observing.
"Where're you off to, then? Somewhere nice that isn't presently defying the rules of weather and physics?" This is asked with sincerity floating somewhere between the hollow of his missing eye and the still present one. "Surely 'somewhere nice' still exists."
Then, as if something's just occurred to him, his face screws up with what looks like equal parts surprise and disgust. Muttered more to himself, as if he doesn't necessarily want to draw attention to it, he breathes, "Oh, shit."
For where she's off to, Emily only clasps her hands in between her knees and lets out a world-weary sigh. "No," she chimes with something like sadness. "No, I don't think there's a chance I can get that far enough away. There's–" Her gaze wanders away from him, going down, discomfort flickering in her eyes. "There's follow-ups to what happened back in April I'm still waiting to hit the fan, and… I've got to be around for whenever that goes off."
One hand comes up to smear the side of her face, and in the process she finishes unhooking her mask from her ear, delicately swiping it off in the hopes of it not being a miserable thing to go back out and wear in the muggy heat shortly. Given the sheer lack of other distractions aside from the ones she makes for herself, and how fleeting they are, Zachery doesn't get his wish in going unnoticed.
Blue eyes dance back over to him, brows lifting in a silent question as to what's on his mind.
Zachery blinks, looking back up at Emily as if in a moment of lag. It doesn't look like when Emily last saw him having memory issues, and he looks perfectly content sitting in his little spot on the floor, drawing his legs closer as he says, "I wasn't listening to you even a little."
It's not an apology so much as a statement, said with complete disregard for what he may have missed. Perhaps assuming this isn't a great surprise, he adds on with a weak sneer curling his lip, like he's just cracked some sort of wretched mind puzzle, "I think I got attached to this place."
Emily blinks when he makes his admission, and she cues in more acutely on his behavior. She watches for signs he might have missed something rather than just having gotten lost in his thoughts, and her head wobbles as he makes his admission. A glance is cast toward the state of the bar, the lived-in-ness of it. She gives it a solid beat of consideration before she supposes, "About time, isn't it. Only up and left it all behind… at least twice, now."
That she knows of.
Her gaze swings back around to Zachery as she acknowledges as off-handedly as she's able, "It's different when the place might not be here to come back to, though, isn't it."
At least twice.
"Suppose so," Zachery answers fairly quickly, his face relaxing back into blankness again. Except for a tightening of his jaw, before he adds, "Surrey - the place I ran off to last time - didn't feel like home to me anymore either. Maybe none of England does. But I get the feeling that was a slow death. Years and years. This—" He pauses. "It's almost sort of nice. Visible."
Thwump, back down he lands on the floor, turning his head so he can look out a window at seemingly nothing. "I should get into Nicole's stash more often."
The thought of a place's death by fire or by culture shift is somewhat sobering to consider. What was worse: if your feelings and ability to connect with somewhere were thrown into a skillet or slowly boiled over a long period of time? But, Emily distracted from that in short order, practically choking on air.
"Zachery," is a scandalized sound, but not reproachful. She blinks wide at him, taking a closer look down at him. "What're you on?"
For a second, Zachery actually looks confused when he aims his attention back at Emily again, before the reality of the situation hits him and he grins, overly pleased with himself and unbidden. The filters that keep that sort of open joy off of his face currently disabled.
"It was a melange," he answers in the way one might mock a menu item at a too-fancy place. "What, do you want some?" An earnest question, if his tone of voice is to be believed. "I thought earlier that I might've slightly overdone it today, but I feel fine now. I feel great."
Emily keeps her wits about her even if now she's wondering, somewhat frantically, what the hell is a melange and if it's something she might need to worry about. It didn't sound like any street drug she'd heard about in her course of work or living, but…
Well, he didn't seem to be going anywhere, ultimately, and appeared to be in relatively good spirits even if distractible. So, fuck it.
She just sighs, shaking her head and letting judgment go for the time being. "Well, at least one of us does," she balks, still rather unhappy about the realization. "And no, I'm not up for any, even if I'm a little jealous." That, too, sounds honest. No, she won't partake out of principle and possibly good sense, but it won't stop her from a spot of envy.
"Why?" Emily fishes as she peers at him, coming to her feet to lurk a little more closely. It might be easier to catch his gaze when he looks back, too. "What'd you get up to earlier?"
Zachery chuckles dryly, running a hand over his jaw, then through his brain operation scar-interrupted hairline. "Just a day off. I figured I should test this robot body. See if everything feels the same. Just… you know, out of curiosity."
His gaze unfocuses a little, and he takes a deep breath with which to continue. "Had nothing to do, so I figured… why not make the rounds. Get some things done I've been meaning to. Peace of mind things. And my timing was impeccable, apparently. With some luck, I may not see you again."
Last time they spoke on a subject just like this, he was doing poorly, to say the least. But even though his grin loses some of its strength, the stare he levels at Emily still carries plenty of visible amusement. "Really, this time. But I wanted to check and see if you weren't burning to a crisp somewhere, first."
"They say they're going to be letting out prisoners to help with fighting the fires," Emily answers offhandedly, trying to look as disaffected as possible by that fact despite the truth. "Including her." She stands there for a moment, trying to fish for what else to say on that front. Eventually, her arms come to pull around her in an uncertain fold, but a tight one nonetheless.
"But, no, still in one piece for now, as you can see," she goes on, looking off to the side rather than at Zachery now. "Appropriate size, appropriate organs, no photosynthesis, thank-you-very-much. And I'm planning on getting far away from her as much as the fires to ensure no crisping." Try as she might, her thin bravado thins even further.
"That's reasonable, right?" she asks suddenly. "A perfectly reasonable thing to do, given the circumstances?"
Her. Zachery's grin wanes further, his remaining eye narrowing just a little, fingers arching ever so slightly against the floor. Thoughts for later, dismissed in the face of the question that follows.
"Absolutely." He answers easily in turn, dryly observing Emily sideways from where he lies. "Let it burn. No reason to burn with it."
But then, he props himself up again, lifting a hand briefly to his chest as if in response to some lingering pain when he rises, slowly, to his feet. "Why are you asking me? Surely you've got people fussing over you left and right, with the absolute madness you've been through lately."
"I think you underestimate how good I am dodging receiving support from the people who care about me, and my ability to aggressively pretend nothing is wrong," Emily says almost on the edge of a chuckle, but it's a little more fraught than that. A little more tense. A piano wire strung evermore tightly, nearing the point of snapping.
"And besides," she remarks as she looks back to him, expression schooled neutral. "I'm better now. Or I should be, shouldn't I? It's been almost a year. I should be better, shouldn't I?" There's a demand in that somewhere. Not to him, to justify her, but maybe herself to actually be. She allows, "And maybe I was, until what happened in April. Until the fires. But there's some things I can bury and some things I just can't, and they're all mixed together right now. The shit that can only ever be covered over is being mixed with the things that can't, and in trying to get dirt back over things again, I'm digging up things I thought were six feet under by now."
Her shoulders are trembling as she finally lets out a nervous laugh and admits, "And not to like guilt trip you or anything, but if you're planning on fucking off into the atmosphere and there's not at least one of you that comes back before long again, that's just one more thing that's going to fucking suck in all this."
Zachery finds himself roaming, wandering toward the bar to climb right on over it, planting himself onto the ring-marked surface before swinging his legs over. "I'd have written you a letter if that were the case. So long as you don't find one of those, I'm on my way back to bother you with questions about… whatever."
Or one of him will be. Of that, he sounds convinced.
"You were a fucking tree, Emily. That's not even all you went through. Fuck knows I don't take enough of an interest to know what else was there. Also?" He reaches up to rummage through what's been left in overhead cupboard storage. Empty glasses clink left and right as he feels for anything left that more resembles a drink. "Better than what?" Finding nothing of note, he aims a look at Emily again, some of his grin returning, even if more subdued this time. "Better than if you let yourself slip into feeling it all in the first place?"
"Fuck you, Dr. Miller, psychiatrist extraordinaire," Emily says as she walks to the bar and lies her hands against the side of it, no particular malice in her toward him. "I spent…" Her eyes roam as she seeks to lay out all the missing details. They're slightly glassy, but coming back from it. Like all the reasons she should be better emotionally stable nourish her somehow. "Like three months doing exclusively nothing but figuring out how my hands worked again and going to therapy. Getting over mutism and being in my head. I spent another three months after that taking it as slow as possible, going back to work so I'd have something to do, but not class, because I needed something that mattered and took up my time rather than leaving me with copious time to keep getting lost in my head again."
Her tongue burrows itself into her cheek as she shakes her head. "And fuck, at this rate, I don't even know if I'm going back to classes in the fall or not. I finally got their stupid system to recognize that I'm a living person again, but with all of this other shit going on…"
She runs out of breath as she gestures vaguely at everything, and her expression breaks momentarily, supposing, finally, that maybe too much is going on.
"… God, I just want to put it all fucking behind me," Emily laments quietly. Then she takes note of Zachery's searching, and her whole perspective shifts as she dissociates from her own situation. She chimes at him with a cheat of her head to one side, "What, being high isn't enough, you have to get cross-faded on top of it? There is too much of a good thing, you know, doc."
A smile breaks out over her then too, and it lacks bitterness. It's more amused than truly chasisting, if only because she's pretty sure the bar looks cleared out. Maybe not the basement, if there is one, but that's a problem for two minutes from now. "What are you even looking for, out of this?" Emily finally asks. "You said it was a trade situation. So far this has been pretty one-sided."
"Why are you going away?" is the follow-up that nearly bowls the observation over, attempting to leave no room for avoiding that particular topic.
In spite of his comment earlier, Zachery listens to Emily with both of his hands now flat on the bartop, like he's listening to some prolonged drink order. He is listening, though, even if all Emily gets in return for her trouble seems to be a slow inhale and big sigh.
Maybe, just maybe, with a little bit of empathy in there.
"What if I wanted to offer you a drink?" He answers with another question, shrugging one shoulder upward. "You came to a bar. It only seems right." With that, he looks behind him, even if he knows the shelves are no good. At least not unless he plans on filling one glass with the remaining contents of 25 different nearly empty bottles.
"I've been preparing, and I'm helping get the first edition of myself back. I think. By which I mean that if they leave without me, I'm rioting. And once that's done, if I live, I'm—"
He doesn't sound quite so sure of the next few words, even if he straightens his spine and lifts his chin to say them. "Then I'm free."
Emily lets out a sensible chuckle when Zachery says the drink is for her. Well, he's got her there. Her head tilts to the side as she supposes she won't argue against the concept of that, but maybe the reality, given the tough crowd in the form of remaining dregs of bottles.
Her expression arrests when he explains what he's been up to, save for eyes fixing back to him right away. Her smile slowly fades, and so does the animation in her posture too. Her hands lose their part in her lean against the bartop, gradually pulling together to rest side by side.
"Wow," is all she manages to say at first, and only after do her eyes start to widen. "That's …" She swallows, looking him over. "Holy shit, right?"
A beat passes, and then another. She gives him a small scoff when her faculties start re-engaging again enough to tell him, "Sure, free, but not from me, right? I'm at least postcard-worthy." Nevermind he doesn't know where she lives. "What about…?" The additional name or names or concepts that would follow seem to be left to him to fill in, it seems.
"Holy shit is right," Zachery breathes, turning back around to face Emily with a somewhat more sober expression than before. Even if she knows him well enough, by now, to know when he's actively having to will himself to stay focused, in the way he pats the side of his coat and wanders the length of the bar on his side.
"Nicole's going too, of course. She's a much better candidate than I am, though I've been trying to, ah—" He stalls, considering his words. "At least make sure I'm in shape enough, and I'm going to get some shooting lessons, and wherever we are, the twins are too. They have to be. If they're…" He pinches the bridge of his nose, followed by a sharp inhale and a quick moving right along, his arms coming up for emphasis by way of tightly controlled gestures. "They'd be 8 months old, give or take."
His attention turns outside again, through a window, amusement now drained from him entirely. "I've called in some favours and done the research, thorough research, and I have no reason to assume that any of the remotely matching twins registered around when they would have been born were Nicole's. Adoptions neither."
He pauses, if only for a beat, but long enough for uncertainty to creep into a creased brow and into a twitch of his fingers at his sides. "Of course, not all countries' records are as easily accessible."
The light shifts in Emily's eyes at the mention of the twins. For Zachery and Nicole, their absence was a keenly felt thing, but it's one that somehow, amid all the other suffering that's happened, had been something she'd lapsed in remembering. At first all she can do is nod to the thought of the preparations he's talking about. Physical shape, mental shape, training– all of that sounds well and good.
"Wherever the two of you are," she interjects in almost a whisper when doubt begins to rise. "I don't think you'd let them go." Not if they had the will. Nothing was saying that they did, given everything that happened– given that they now know that these abductions happened overnight and in a superpower-caused sleep– but…
"Do you need me to give you a pep talk?" she finds herself asking, even if only she really knows what she means by it. "Because I absolutely will."
There is a silence that comes over the room, before Zachery promptly turns on a heel and faces Emily again, head turned a little just to center her in his vision.
His grin returns, widening with a strange, relieved sort of joy for the previous subject to be set aside for now, drugs in his system probably helping it along somewhat. that subject's taken up enough of his thinking time as it is. "I was going to say I was alright, for once. But go on, then. I'll write you up a happy Christmas card in return."
A challenge as much as curiosity.
Emily turns her head to the side in an exaggerated tell of her surprise, trying to show a gamely face, even if she's somewhat nervous that he's taken her up on it. Okay, so they were doing this. "If you're already feeling great, then this is just the cherry on the top, okay? The Christmas card will make good cell decoration if things get particularly fucked here in a few days, though, so I'll look forward to it."
That aside, she drums her fingertips along the bartop, looking him over. He's inebriated already; and she's learned that makes a difference. But she knows words have meaning, and these can't be just any.
"I'm gonna tell you this, though, and it might sound like bullshit– and that's partly because all affirmations sound like bullshit– but it's also not." Her eyes narrow thoughtfully at him. "You deserve answers. You deserve justice. And no matter how hard it is, or fucked up it is, I know you're going to fight for it." She blinks, and she feels the weft of her ability threading its way into the loom of him, opening a glimpse into his emotional state. "It doesn't sound like you're taking these opportunities to get ready for this lightly, and you damn well better not, because there's a life for you after this that you deserve just as much as the next Zachery. And you're gonna survive to live it."
"Because you can do this. Any time you start to lose track of things, if you breathe and center yourself, you can push through anything. Nicole is going to need you. Whoever else is going with you is going to need you. You have what it takes to get you back."
She breathes in again, having expelled every bit of her breath, and her shoulders pitch slightly upward with it as she holds onto the side of the bar, watching him. She wishes she could do more than just wish him well– to go with him and them, but–
Those words seem to echo. You have what it takes to get you back.
She believes it.
The silence that follows this time is different. Both in that it lasts longer, and in that Emily gains a unique insight into what lies beyond that inebriation — and the reason for it, for that matter. She's right in that he's taking this seriously, but only in the same way one might approach a bear attack.
Except that the bear's been standing there for a while now, and will continue to do so for weeks on end.
Below the feigned confidence and jabs and deflection, perhaps predictably, there is just a blanket of suffocating pressure, heavy with how terrified Zachery is to have been put in this position. But it's not just that. There is a little room for hope, even if it's small, a tiny seedling of a thing that's all he's been able to allow himself to cling onto.
Though the grin disappears from his face in stages, it's in stark contrast to what Emily actually manages to achieve. The bear stays, but the pressure lets up. Some space is created, within which other things can start to grow.
"I know all that," he still deflects, even now, voice barely above a whisper, before pulling a staggered breath into his lungs after what feels like minutes of forgetting to breathe. Her shoulders come up, his own relax. But only just before he looks sharply away from her again, clears his throat, and says, "Remind me never to do that again."
Every inch of him the image of someone trying not to fully break down, he tacks on, "But thank you."
Emily tries for her part to keep her own proverbial shit together and not contribute to any loss of composure. She almost starts to smile, involuntarily, but it's coaxed back with a shake of her head. "I told you it was bullshit," she faux-grumbles to him without looking at him. One hand comes up to swipe at the side of her eye as surreptitiously as possible while she seemingly considers the arrangement of chair and table-stacking along the wall. "But if the only thing I can do is tell you you matter and that you've got this, then why the fuck wouldn't I."
She takes in a deeper breath for herself, and rounds back on him with somewhat of a frown. "Though I can't lie, now I really wish there was more I could do for this. I don't– I don't know much about what's been going on recently. It feels like I missed a lot."
Failing to find an answer for that first question, Zachery just plants both his elbows on the bartop and leans forward onto it, looking suddenly much more tired than he had, earlier. Maybe wishing he could find an answer to that first question, hypothetical or not.
But something else slips into the tired, wired mess of emotions already there, speeding recovery up a little. "What do you mean?" He almost laughs the words out, taken by surprise. "Ships in the night waylaid temporarily by some shitty coffee not been enough for you?"
He scrubs a hand over his own eyes - or one and a socket - and aims a curious look at Emily after. "Go on, then. What do you think you missed? Might be your last chance to ask. Even better, the me I'm dragging back here by the scruff isn't going to know, so it's basically free game, isn't it."
It's Free Real Estate, Emily's brain immediately wants to meme. She's almost positive he would not get the reference, and all the same, her eyes bug and she blows her cheeks out at the thought of getting into the depths of what's been happening to the Sundered, and figuring out how she's going to compartmentalize that against everything else that she's dealing with at the moment.
But you know, fuck it. She asked. He's here. He's willing, ostensibly, to share details.
"I mean– I know you think– you know that you're not you, now. But I'm not on the case that had been looking into the kidnappings and what happened. So did…" Her expression wavers, trying to find the right phrasing for it. "Did you find out who took you, I'm guessing? And you're going to go fuck them up and get yourselves back? Just… where? How? Is there anything I can do to help before you go?"
"Or– after, I guess, for that matter?" Her eyes are still wide as she asks, preemptively prepared to be overwhelmed by whatever informational dump is coming.
Zachery laughs, now, and it seems to take him by surprise. Still, he doesn't stifle it, letting it just ring out into the abandoned pub. "Yeah, ah—" He hesitates on that particular answer, casting a look upward as he thinks on how to word it. "Ha, no, there hasn't really been a call to get me in to do any of the planning, what with my… whole entire self, and with the way my brain's been skipping like a greasy CD, besides."
If the fact that they might have let him be more involved if he'd specifically requested to be occurs to him, it's not voiced. Still, he doesn't look like it's bothering him in the moment. "I'm just… waiting for the call. In the meantime I've learned how to use grenades, a very big silly string caulk gun, and should probably step foot in a shooting range again soon."
Some of the energy visibly leaves him again at that thought. Even if he's unwilling to do what needs to be done without something considered as basic as firearms, it's clear he's not psyched about that particular aspect.
Suddenly, whatever's floating through his brain at the moment has him looking directly at Emily again - this time with a careful but sharp sort of excitement. "You don't think I could just make do with a cricket bat again, do you?" It's hypothetical. Maybe. He sounds thoughtful, and… proud? "I really did nail someone with that at Whitehearth. There were teeth on the floor and all."
Emily tries her fucking best to not look horrified somehow that Zachery knows now how to use only two of the three items he's mentioned in his learning spree, doing her best especially not to pull either of her hands to her face, given what they're currently touching. Sure, maybe Bruce cleaned this place up before stacking the furniture away, but maybe he didn't, and either way, there's a slight stickiness to that lacquer that's probably never coming out.
All the better that he circles back around quickly enough, her posture relaxing somehow at the question. She gives him a perfectly thoughtful, "Well, as long as you don't need range on anyone," as if it were a perfectly rational question. She's positive she's used a baseball bat effectively in theoretical violence before, and those were–
Her memory catches, remembering she's seen Zachery use a baseball bat quite effectively at actual violence before, too.
She forces a smile, despite the unnatural hitch of a pause when the thought crept up on her. "And should you, if you bring a ball, you're covered."
"Oh, I'm sure anyone working to keep the other me away from the general public will be happy to watch me fail to hit that until I don't," Zachery answers readily, mimicking a swing and a miss, but almost doesn't manage to finish doing it before laughing again.
He casts Emily a narrowed look, mockery slipping into his tone. "You know, just because I can no longer sense your heartbeat doesn't mean I can't still look at your face. Even if it leaves me a little blinder. And a little more disconnected."
Not that he technically ever could sense heartbeats the way he remembers, but he remembers it all the same.
He, too, tries his fucking best to keep something off of his face— but it looks more like excitement than anything else. Something keen, something anticipatory. "It's a lot. You can say it. This is all a lot. I don't really do violence eith—" he stops, breathes out another huff of amusement, and then corrects himself: "I don't generally… plan for violence either."
"It's a lot," she says calmly, not blurting it out, but sighing it because jesus christ, it really is. And apparently she's done a shit job of hiding it from him.
Emily starts to shake her head, trying to steady herself, to do anything she feels is useful, but that escapes her at the moment. And maybe the most useful thing she can do is just to be here, just to take his– their– minds off of the terrible state of the world around them. What a thought. A perfectly wonderful paradox, driven by her reaching for over and over perhaps the very things they've come to dance their way around directly addressing.
Her eyes dart over the back of the bar again and she juts her chin at one of the bottles that seems to have more than a knuckle's worth left at the bottom of it. "Okay," she says blandly. "Assuming that whatever's in that isn't jungle juice, I'll gladly polish it off now."
"And fuck you, by the way," she balks without meaning it. "I had a poker face once. Then I grew a heart. Look where that's fucking got me."
Oh good! Fun! Zachery straightens up from his slump, immediately grabbing two, three, four bottles by the necks and planting them all on the bartop, knocking one over and onto the floor on Emily's side in the process. He barely even blinks as it shatters.
"It's fine," he says of it, and the heart also, "Just ask the other me to help remove it when you come back. Like a tumor. Or a wart." Then, motioning at the remaining bottles with too much energy, he asks, "Well? I think your options are rum, tequila, or…"
He squints at the last bottle, which markedly lacks a legible label, but does contain a fun shade. "Or blue."
Skeptically, Emily reaches for the blue by its neck and quirks an eyebrow at the whole situation, stepping aside so she ideally isn't standing close to the epicenter of shattered glass anymore. As far as she could tell, the shrapnel of it that's scattered didn't cut her legs, and that's something of a miracle. She sniffs at the mystery alcohol while she looks down at the ground, kicking aside bits of glass to create a safe zone to stand in. Thank goodness for the foresight of wearing closed-toed shoes? "I don't know," she says after a moment. It smells fruity to her. Too sweet, in fact. "I think it's mixer of some kind."
She opts not to test it herself, at least yet, glancing between the other bottles. A squint is given at the tequila, deeming it to be not the mood she's going for, and takes the rum in her other hand. Some fuss is made in the process of setting aside her first bottle, popping the top off the second, and then using the pour stopper of the blue to dump one remnant into the other.
Emily, what was it you just said about mystery mixed drinks?
"That's mine too," she tells him with a lift of her index finger off the bottle of rum, pointing at the tequila she has no intention of drinking but she certainly doesn't want Zachery mixing with whatever he had going on already. "So keep a close eye on it for me, would you?" Only barely does she manage to keep her preternatural persuasiveness out of her voice, feeling like that might be overkill. Not to mention, he might take it literally somehow.
Tipping the bottle in her hand back, she takes a brave gulp of it before lowering it down, holding the neck by her fist rather than anything daintier. She pulls a face and smacks her lips, looking unimpressed and somewhat toward Zachery for sympathy. "Mmm. Blue rum," she relays with dry enthusiasm. "Maybe not my best choice, but we're off the clock here, aren't we."
Without even taking in another breath, she segues seamlessly into a thought that's only just struck her, but has immediately vacated her brain because of its high importance. "Where's Pippa in all this?"
Definitely off the clock. Zachery wouldn't look so very entertained if he wasn't, except— that, too, pales a little when Pippa of all people is brought up.
"She's fiiine," he replies in sing-song, still trying to hold onto the remnants of being so very unconcerned, but overcompensating in the process and turning right around to look at the other bottles still left on the shelves, stretching his arms up before they come back down, hands clasped behind his head. "She's at a… very extended sleepover at Nicole's sister's. Give me a month, I said."
He laughs again, but it's a much shorter thing this time, turning bitter in his mouth.
With a sharp inhale, he reaches for more bottlenecks by way of distraction and habit both, but stops just short of actually pulling them from where they stand, frozen mid-action as a realisation finally strikes fully, and he adds much more rigidly, "Jesus, it's been five months."
"Holy fuck, Zachery," is an automatic response to that, but it doesn't carry the weight of reprimand behind it. Somehow.
None of them expected to be in this shitty situation this long. They'd have ideally had themselves back by now, the same way Emily would have never been a tree at all, much less for as long as she was. You don't get to choose the things you become victim to and how they impact you.
That empathy also extends to Pippa though as Emily's expression pulls sad. It's drowned with a smaller sip of the rummy mix in her hand. "She's going to need you, when you get back. You and Nicole both," she realizes, aloud, before she can think to not say these things. "Not the other them. You. You who she's been through all this with, and you who aren't… going to need months and months, maybe, to come back mentally from whatever the others have been through."
"If they're in straits anything like what we saw in Whitehearth," and god does that feel dangerous to say aloud, even in private, even in an abandoned bar, but she says it anyway and her weight shifts, hair on the back of her neck raising slowly in response to the danger of even acknowledging that situation. "And they've been in it for a year– I needed physical therapy when I stopped being a tree, because I forgot how to be me, even if I was physically fine."
Emily repeats, a stunned expression on her face because it changes the tone of this sorry potentially final farewell between them so drastically, "She's… she's going to need you, even if her parents come home."
Zachery observes the empty bottles as if they were talking to him, rather than Emily. His attention drifts from sad shelf to sad shelf, until the word 'parents' seems to remind him to draw breath again. He does not immediately speak, humming an idle note as he gathers his thoughts and wits both.
"I don't know how long I have," he finally decides on saying, turning around to face Emily again, his face stuck somewhere between determination and concern, brow knit. "We still know so little about our expiration dates. I wouldn't be the first of us to bleed out into my brain while no one's looking."
As far as he can make out, anyway, from reports on Kimiko Nakamura.
He shakes his head, one palm landing against the side of the bartop as if it'll help anchor him when he continues to say, tone flat, "I know what the worst case scenario is, and that would be not bringing anyone back and dying. But I can't let the best case scenario end up involving her having to mourn her parents twice."
Parents. There it is again. He visibly fights down a grimace with a twitch of a shoulder, like the word is an ill-fitting coat.
Emily has to swallow to make sure there's absolutely zero things in the way of what she needs to say, because wouldn't that be embarrassing. She sets the bottle on the edge of the bar, hand firm around the neck of it to ideally prevent its theft.
"None of us, even us mere regular mortals, knows our expiration date, Zachery," Emily laments sympathetically. "You know that better than anyone else, don't you? Plenty of people walking around with the equivalent of ticking bombs inside their chest and head and legs and rest of their body. Some who even know about them and just have to go on living with that knowledge."
She breathes out and rolls the bottle on its rounded bottom, a frown wanting to come but something more pensive taking its place. "And she's going to mourn you no matter what. If what Devon and I went through is any fucking indication, she's going to love him as much as she loves you. Both Nicoles will be her mother to her."
"I don't have to look into her eyes to see into that crystal ball," Emily reports ruefully.
She suddenly offers the bottle out to him. Apparently she's decided she's been the bearer of enough shitty truths she'd want to crossfade until it hurt less, and empathy is her strength and failing both in this world.
Zachery does know about the fickle frailty of the human body — that much is clear in how he leans into that bartop like it helps stave off the groan that ends up leaving him anyway.
But he listens, still, addled and annoyed and all, even if he's leveling a less than kindly stare at Emily.
And then he thinks, one-eyed gaze wandering again. Like he's forgotten he's part of this conversation too, he just stands there, and then finally puts a hand up to bargain for a few more seconds while he considers what's been said. "I just… I don't believe that."
Having finally found some words, he looks almost glad to have done so, looking at Emily head on again. But the lopsided grin that finds itself on his face is not an easy one, tight with discomfort and some unwelcome self-awareness. "I simply do not believe it. I've tried, and yet. And I can't go into this with doubt. Any of it."
She doesn't stare hard enough to know for certain, but she suspects it's a coping mechanism, what Zachery outlines. He has to not believe her, because the alternative is too painful to consider. And there is no room for doubt.
So Emily turns her eyes away and relents with a shrug, losing the staring contest willingly.
"Well," she supposes with a smirch of her tongue off her cheek. "If free game is still on the table, any dark or darkly funny secrets you want to tell me so that I can casually weave them into conversation and freak Zachery out when he gets back?" Emily looks back to him then finally, but only over the side of the bottle as she takes another swig.
She tries admirably to keep from cringing at the taste and manages to school it down into something that could be a thoughtful narrow of eyes. But god, is the taste not endearing.
There's tappataptap of fingers drumming against the bar top. Zachery thinks, his mind at once occupied by this new prompt.
"… Oh. That's fun." His grin widens a little more sincerely this time, and he straightens, pushing away from the bartop to begin pacing around the conveniently cleared room, ducking to around bumping his head into a slanted wall's support. "Referring to him as 'Zachery' feels right, actually. Surprisingly. That's fortunate."
And not only because it lets him separate himself from the other him. "Where to start, where to— ah." Coming to a stop, he turns to point at Emily directly, and says brightly and in the tone of a reminder of a long-accepted fact more so than, presumably, an actual secret, "You know you're basically a younger sister to him, yes?"
The strangled kind of sound that comes from Emily could be a belated cough of the alcohol she'd taken in. Surely.
Surely.
"I said secrets–" Emily manages to wheeze.
"Oh, I see," Zachery counters, eye narrowing. "So not the quiet things we're not supposed to say out loud. Like how it helps him miss his brother a little less, which in turn makes him feel less guilty for never bringing him up in the first place."
He meanders closer in easier steps now, hands plunging into the pockets of his coat as he rounds Emily, watching her closely through the one still too-dilated pupil. But the enthusiasm does not stop there, and he gladly dips into a different avenue of untold things: "Or is this the sort of secret that's more along the lines of— being part of a terrorist organisation? Missing prison? Killing a man and getting away with it? Helping to create a virus that could've…"
Something sours in him, then, with an exhale and look askance. Like whatever mental trampoline he's on almost twisted his ankle there. "Done a— a great deal of harm."
Just kidding, she really is choking on what she drank or at the very least an awkwardly-timed breath after it, and the only cure appears to be more drinking to try and numb her esophagus, windpipe, or both. "Fuck," she manages out after swigging back what's nearly the last of the bottle. It's a good thing she didn't drive here, nearly as much as it is a good thing she generally doesn't drive.
She manages to look up at him, catches the way he both eyes her and yet stares as if he's done something particularly souring. Yeah, no, she doesn't know what she expected either when she tore open the can of worms. But raggedly, she offers back in return, "I'll never tell him how nice it's been, to have something like a brother. Mine died. I was old enough to miss him but not old enough to know him. Not really. So it's been nice. Even this."
Her arm comes up as she rattles the last of a cough into the corner of her elbow while looking away from him, like out of some sense of propriety. If she doesn't look at him, clearly the theoretical germs she wheezes into the crook of her arm also won't hit him. "But you get to hear that. Not him. Also, what the fuck."
"The worst part is I know you're not lying," she remarks as she swings her arm away, glancing at him out of the corner of squinted, watery eyes. "And I think those are going to be pretty hard to casually slip into conversation. Definitely panic-inducing, though, so– points there?" She tries to keep her cool, for what reasons she does not even know. Maybe she hopes that having already aired one what the fuck will suffice in that regard.
'It's been nice', she says. Zachery scoffs as if involuntarily.
"You can't tell him," he agrees, with a spreading of his arms, hands out. "At least the brother thing. You're good on everything else," even if he himself won't be there, it's clear from the way his expression brightens that he'd love to have been. "But it would shatter the pity party he's got going on if he knew he had company who was there willingly."
Someone's been introspective the last handful of months. Or maybe it's just the mystery drugs. Maybe both. His joy only seems to increase with anticipation for what bodily function will fail Emily next when he says, tone of voice dropping a little, "Hey, at least he doesn't think of you like a daughter. He considered it." This is an important note, if the cant of his head and the amount of emphasis with which he says it is anything to go by. "But no. Isn't that a relief?"
He breathes a quick exhale of - presumably - relief, himself.
"Frankly, yes," Emily replies immediately and glibly. "But it only stays that way so long as you don't go emotionally spilling my beans to him, if you see him and… I don't know, something happens." She sniffs after that, and god what a mistake that was. Her sinuses burn now, and her eyes still were halfway watered from the hacking cough, and this absolutely isn't a look she wants to be putting on right now.
They were being blasé together, after all.
"When you said 'missing prison', though, did you mean … missing it, or not going to it?" she asks with the perplexed bent of the question also causing her head to angle slightly, confusion becoming physical, too.
There is no holding back the mockery in Zachery's half suppressed laugh when Emily goes coughing, and he starts moving again — but quickly this time, letting hasty steps carry him toward an almost invisible sticker-covered black door on a sticker-covered black wall in the back of the bar.
Tearing the door open, he ducks inside, leaning around the corner while leaving one hand visible where he's wrapped it around the doorframe. "I'm not telling him anything," he announces, then, over the sound of a minifridge being opened, and then slammed shut. "I don't like him enough."
Once he's found his way back to Emily, he's holding two small bottles. They're plastic. Water. Notably room temperature. One's relinquished by setting it loose directly onto the bartop, rolling, for Emily to rescue before it finds the floor. The other is cracked open so he can swallow what he's got in his other hand, something thrown directly from palm into the back of his throat unseen and uncommented on.
After a glug of his own water, he eyes Emily, like he's not quite sure she didn't already know what he's about to say. "Missing it," he clarifies either way. "There was a structure to it. A sort of belonging. Every day the same, no visitors, no complications."
Water rescued, even though she nearly dropped the dregs of the other bottle in the process, Emily appreciates the diluting of the mystery mixture it provides her. There's a self-satisfied smack of lips that follows her own drink, over the top of which she admits, "You're not alone in that. That– it makes up part of the reason why some people are repeat offenders. You can miss something that's objectively not great because of something it did provide you."
"Like being in the hospital, with the wombo combo of cancer and an autoimmune disease," she adds almost as an aside. "Not having to deal with people outside those I expected to see. Nurses. Occasional doctor. Under no circumstances would I have called it fun, but there was routine to it. Plenty of free time, too, in which I got to do virtually anything I wanted to, as long as it basically kept me in bed. I was in pain and nauseated to shit from the chemo, but I had… escapes. And maybe it was because everything else was so shitty that simple pleasures like that felt good, but…"
She wrinkles her nose and sets the bottle back down on the countertop, the thin plastic of it crinkling as she lets it go. "I get it, is what I'm saying." And she understood him a little better, as a result. There was a time where she wished her world was smaller and its rules more defined, to make it easier to navigate through. Sometimes, even, she still did.
"The tree was different," she admits aloud for the first time ever. People knew, and certainly her therapist did even if Emily had never said to her all these words in this exact order. She has no intention to keep explaining, and yet she does. "It took a long time for the terror to wear off. And then it was just… being. And that was nice."
Brow knitting, she recalls, "And… then they found me. Had, um… telepaths and dreamwalkers. I had been in this alien state, almost dreaming, almost not. And then they reminded me I'd been human, and the terror came back. Instead of being a tree, I went back to being a human stuck as a tree, and it was many more months after that before Avi and Devon found her and made her undo what had happened to me."
Emily blinks then, realizing she's not been seeing much of anything since her little reverie began. "They didn't know. How could they have? They just… wanted to let me know they cared. That they were fighting for me." She swallows hard and reaches for the water again out of a desire to have something physical to do. "If it'd not been for that–" she admits. "If they hadn't woken me up in there and made me remember what I'd lost… trapped me in the horror show of remembering breathing and walking and moving my arms and speaking and being able to do none of those things… I'd probably miss being a tree, too."
She drinks aggressively then to stop herself from saying anything more as much as to rid her palate of the taste of bile that has started to crawl up her throat.
Nothing like a viscerally alarming subject to calm the nerves, apparently. Zachery stands on the other side of the bar, listening with nothing in his expression changing but the lightest knit of his brow.
But again, he sighs. Not to communicate something, but as some of that aforementioned pressure escapes through a valve. When he speaks again, it's a little quieter.
"In a way, it's nice to know that if they'd failed to get you back," so to speak, "You'd have been alright. Maybe that's what death is like, as well. All terror and then just… change, accepted."
And then he clears his throat and ups his volume again, leaning a little closer to Emily while swirling the water in his bottle by way of keeping busy in whatever small way. "Thanks for helping me not feel as badly about only having visited your leafy self twice, by the by. You're moving your arms wonderfully, really nailing the 'person-shaped' bit."
"Oh, go fuck yourself," Emily drawls at him with the mystery hooch still held close to her face. She uses it as a tool to gesture at him as she returns, "You're not doing half so bad yourself, you goddamn robot."
There's a stuttered choke as she nearly laughs because she thinks she's funny and at the same moment nearly laughs because of her horrific audacity just then. Then, with a crease of her brow, because jesus fucking christ, the lives they all lead, that laugh finally tears free of her anyway. Buzzed from the alcohol, she seems to even let down her walls, one hand loosely draped across her abdomen, head tilting back and – well, what comes out is not quite a cackle; Eve Mas has a particularly strict lockdown on that copyright, as far as Emily is concerned.
"Oh, we're a fucking mess, aren't we," fumbles from her after she's done with that fit, the hand over her clothes coming up to swipe a finger along the side of her eye. "Top to bottom."
"You're just finding that out now?" Zachery asks, a dry laugh escaping him after the combo attack of being called on his shit. "The moment I met you I knew you were broken."
He straightens, then, as if hearing himself say those words without thinking jolts the composure back into him. Still, he laughs, the momentum of amusement carrying across an addled brain's crossed wires. "Not, you know, irreparably. Just in the way that many of us are. In the way that's hard to see when you're younger. At least—"
The 'for me' is implied at best, even if it refuses to leave him. Instead, he tilts his head in Emily's direction, scoffing out another chuckle. "A mess and a lightweight, at that. I'd cut you off, but."
He gestures blindly behind him, at the nothing.
"Hey, I'll take being a lightweight than a lush," she preens in response, setting the dregs of the dregs back on the bartop regardless. "Cheaper date, less liver damage…" Emily has to mull that one, before adding, "Theoretically."
She shakes her head, swimming mentally out of it all, and with the same air as before looks directly back to Zachery. "Hey," comes from her effortlessly. "Come home, okay? At least try." Her head starts to tilt, and then she begins to shake it, expression creasing for a moment. "Not for anyone else's sake," Emily admits. "Just mine. Selfishly."
Her posture begins to shift, arm starting to brace herself like she's contemplating vaulting the bar– because that's exactly what she's considering doing– but she decides to not make that much of a fool of herself in the end, elbow dropping back down even if her hand remains very sternly planted on the sticky bartop. After all, Emily Epstein is not necessarily a hugger to begin with, what had she even been thinking. She squints at nothing, trying to summon something else profound to make up for the momentary spectacle she just made, but only comes up with an eventual, almost pained, "… Yup."
There's not much in the way of a reply from Zachery when Emily makes her enhanced bid, beyond eyelids tightening against eyeball and slightly saggy emptiness both.
"Mh." A thoughtful noise escapes him, and for a moment it looks like he's about to laugh again, before it's swallowed back down. "That's it," he decides all at once, and then pulls away from the bar to round it and wander back into the grimy rest of the space, decisive steps taking him tight past Emily so he can open the door. "That'll do for now, I'm sending you off. Take that water with you."
The door rattles on its hinges as it comes to a stop in his grasp, the air flooding in dusty and sharp and heavy all at once. Zachery motions outward, monocularly looking toward Emily with the kind of expectancy one might give a dog that needs to go be in the yard for a bit. "Before you start asking about the other secrets."
Emily watches Zachery go past with a twist of her torso, hand finally coming away from the bartop as she fixes him with a confused look until the door's open. She blinks at him, and then scoffs at his decision. For a moment, she does nothing, and then she mulls it with a, "Well…" before she leaves the water behind entirely, instead fishing up the well-worn mask she had been wearing when she entered. "We have to leave some for later, naturally. I'll have to come up with some less depressing ones between here and then."
She threads the mask back over her face with practiced ease granted over an unknown period of time, if not at least these last few weeks, walking toward the door. As Emily passes Zachery, she pulls another disposable mask from the side of the small bag and shoves it against his chest as she steps out into the bright haze of the day.
She looks back at him one last time with half her expression hidden away by the mask, then fishes the aviators down from the top of her head and hides away the other half also. She nods to herself, maybe, as much as him. "Right then," she mutters,"I should probably get back to … getting the hell out of town, anyway." And with a vague gesture of one hand toward the general direction of that business, then heads off into the city without another word.