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[ That... seems even more impossible than trying to prevent him losing his optimism in the first place. Not just because he's infinitely a better person than she is already, but-

Well, she still doesn't know if she trusts herself enough to manage something like that. Every part of her that wants to try is still at war with all the old habits and parts that wear distance like armour and only want to concentrate on all the bad things. On the things she couldn't do before so why would it begin now?

But she wants to try more than she thought she ever could. It smoulders deep in her chest in the same way that determination to take on Dagny's apprenticeship did - the kind of thing that makes Kate grit her teeth and try to ignore the warring, rather than anything else. She wants this, wants her own mind to stop overthinking everything and just let them be for a while. Maybe she can stop this self-imposed exile that she's - consciously or not - been doing for years. Be a little bit selfish, but in a better way than usual.

She doesn't bother to say anything to that, just pours them both a shot and downs hers, silent until; ] If anyone I know turns up, tell 'em nowt. [ It's all been so serious that she needs to joke a little. And joking at her expense is a good enough way to do it.

(Seriously though? If Carl or Alicia turn up, she's never hearing the end of it.) ]

[ Maybe Dean presented it as a possibility because he's an asshole - he doesn't really know. He doesn't think Sam can get much better than he already is; like Cas, they are the only two objects in the universe that he wouldn't want to be any different than all the things they are. He can take their pains, their annoyances, their oddities and run with them because they're family. Because they're his, his people, his brothers in arms. They are all he knows, and the idea of splitting them into the parts is an obscenity, as if pulling one thing from them will set the whole world unravelling.

He wouldn't want them any different, not for the world, not for anything. They are all he knows, all he cares for in life, all he steps forward for. To think of them changing is a terrifying thing amongst all other terrifying things and Dean is already scared shitless, scared that he is their ruination, that they will leave because of all that he is. And maybe they will and maybe, at the end of the day, he would deserve every ounce of that.

But her comment still makes him almost come up with a laugh, lifting up another shot and almost sloshing the liquid sideways (party foul!) because it's just funny. It just is and he doesn't really know why, the absolute teenager racket of it, the teasing and the flirting and the bubbly not knowing. ]

Believe me, i'm not the type to go around spillin' secrets. [ Down the hatch goes the shot and Dean's starting to feel real damn cozy, like he wants to put his head down and blot out the world, but he shakes it instead and something spins sideways as he drags a hand across his eyes. ] Everybody else can tell 'em for me.

[ At least they might sleep easy tonight - if by sleeping, blacking out is meant. That's pretty much the same thing, right?? There's enough hours in blacking out that no one will complain. And Kate snorts because that's kind of true, because Cas kind of spilled secrets already without any of Dean's help. Unless that post counts, and she doesn't think it does.

It is daft and stupid and a thousand things she doesn't think she did even as a teenager, back when dating meant three weeks of awkward snogging and eventually breaking up because of some random detail that really means nothing when thought about in any long-term context. But it keeps things lighter than they have been in a long time. In most of this session, at least. ] Fair enough. [ she laughs, mostly because yeah, no one in this place seems to be able to keep a secret too long. Whatever the gods do to elicit emotion, it seems to be all about bringing out those secrets. Old scars and all the rest of it, whatever cliche a person cares to use for those secrets. ] Doubt they'll turn up anyway. [ it could happen, but it's been so long now that she really thinks that this place has decided she's the only chaotic link in her world.

... it's probably right. ]

Edited 2016-08-07 12:32 (UTC)

[ And lord, it's not like they don't deserve it, even if blacking out isn't a real kind of sleep, something that counts in quite the same way. Not that Dean cares; he's convinced he's slept more here in the past few weeks than he has in years, not that it's at all restful. It's nightmare fueled and full of tortured attempts to keep everyone's deaths from slipping through his fingers but he tells himself it's sleep because at least his head is against the pillow for most of it. And so maybe blacking out counts for even more because it'll just be the darkness, the full release of consciousness where nothing can come slinking its way into the depths to hurt and fray and rip them to shreds.

But at least she laughs and that counts for something, right? It means this conversation is supposed to be hurting less, even if Dean still aches somewhere identifiable but he's been aching for days and he just can't shake free. It's a perpetual bruise on his soul from where he's ripped himself away from Cas, from where he's silently pointed out the things he cannot have, and he's doing everything in his power to ignore it, even now. To cling to the necessity of humor because it's all he's ever had. ]

Keep saying that and maybe they will.

[ Because isn't that how life always works? Tell yourself enough times that something'll never happen and it'll pop up eventually, smack you in the face and laugh. But maybe they won't, maybe she's right and he's got nothing of anything to give that doesn't suck, but at least he isn't pouring himself another shot. Yet. Instead angling the bottle in his hand and looking at the remains of the tequila, wondering if it somehow evaporated in their midst. ] But hey, if not- you got more than enough people here to make up for it.

[ He snorts though, because he knows that's bullshit. Knows it doesn't count. ] Even if it's like fuckin MTV around here, I don't know where the hell all these teenagers are comin' from.

[ maybe that wouldn't be so bad. but she's always going back and forth on it, feeling terrible for wanting her friends here, in the murdercave, in the first place while also knowing that her friends can (almost) all handle themselves. they're used to being underground and, really - if she ignores the guilt she feels about her own wants - it would just be nice to mention facets of home without feeling like they need a definition to go with it. if she's going to jinx herself in any way, having company would be one of the better ways to do it without a doubt. and really, everyone would get a kick out of alicia meeting hadriel's sense of "style".

she's not quite sure when they got through that much of the bottle either, judging by the way she squints at the level of liquid left. apparently shots of tequila go down faster when you're a mess, who knew? but the mention of all the teenagers around this place does enough to make Kate shake her head in amusement. ] You think of a better source of chaos than being a teenager? [ it must be some grace of god that she came here at this age, because her younger self was so much more openly chaotic, openly a mess. and it can't be to do with times, otherwise everyone would be from the same year, right? ]

[They work in silence for a while -- almost total silence, since their crafting isn't very loud, nor is their breathing. Emily finishes two strands of shiny stones (they're going to look so good on the shawl, she really hopes he likes it) before she decides she needs a break from the quiet.]

If the Door is supposed to bring in shitty people, why the fuck id Glacius here?

[ Kate is quiet at that. She... has an idea why he thinks he might have been brought here, after his monster and after their talk, but it's not her story to tell. And nor does she really think it's enough.

Shitty people is reserved for people like her, really. ]

Ask meself that every time I see him. [ It's what she settles on, anyway. ] Maybe the gods are just lying. [ And she'll definitely go for blaming the gods over saying a word on her own knowledge. Sorry, Em. Nothing personal, she just doesn't want to tell a story he should have the freedom to decide on telling. ]

[ Dean sets the bottle back down after another few moments of inspection, quietly hoping it might manage to refill itself through hopefulness alone. As if they truly need more to drink - they don't, he knows it, knows that he didn't need more to drink the second he stepped foot in this bar - but that's not the point. Dean still wants to drown himself until nothing is left, until he doesn't have to wonder what it would be like here without Sam, without Cas, without these feelings nagging under his skin and laying to waste the reputation he's built of himself, walls he constructed that were meant to keep everything out and more.

But the comment makes him grin - perhaps, unusually. He's the rebel, the asshole, the guy without a plan, and he's laughing about the idea of the mess of teenagerdom. It's weird he knows, and he knows he's off the cuff about it in some screwball way, but Dean can almost think of nothing more ordered than when he was a teenager. Perhaps there was the inevitable chaos, the realm of girls he didn't understand and places he didn't yet know but there was a simplicity in the world in he occupied, in the body he held. His life was his father's and nothing more, and while the happiest of times held order and a life he could not believe in, with regularity he knew nothing more than what his father laid out in front of him.

A better source of chaos? Hell, maybe. The apocalypse. The Mark. He's not sure. But being a teenager? Still earns a grin. ]

I dunno, I can maybe think of a few. But gotta give 'em credit for pulling in a group of kids who know how to keep their head. I mean- just think'a the prom crowd in this place. The Heathers would lose their shit.

Wouldn't surprise me. [She rolls her eyes. As far as she can tell, Glacius doesn't deserve to be here. He's the exact opposite of someone who should be here. Emily, though. Emily deserves this punishment.]

Since you helped, you should probably be there when it's time to give this to him.

[ The only word that comes to mind for her teenage years is aimless, back when everything was still so fresh and the family friends - adoptive parents, whatever - that took her and Marc in were too busy to be more than a bank account and occasional sympathy. So instead of coping with things, she floated and fell into every bad habit in the book. Joined an organisation she knew would be filled with the things she feared most just because her brother - her best friend, both of those things - said he wanted to. Thought he had to.

(He didn't. He really, really didn't. She knows they never found out the full story. Just because they knew who ripped their parents' guts from their bodies doesn't mean they got the full story.)

And, somehow, Kate almost thinks that she would have handled this place better at 19 than at 30. Would have just accepted this as another shitty part of life rather than an attempt to drag her away from a life that was looking up - had been looking up for years.

Fuck it, they don't need more to drink at all, but now her mind's scanning through the depths of her younger years and the last of the bottle seems like as good a place as any to find a way to extinguish the thoughts that flare to life. ]

Never did prom. [ It isn't really a thing back home, only seen in American shows and movies. No one dressed up that much for a school disco either, no one saw them as anything less than embarrassing. ]

[ That... she hadn't been anticipating or planning on doing, and it shows in the fact that Kate's hands stop, for a moment, in their threading. ]

... Sure. [ she'd like to see his face, actually. ] How long does summat like this take? [ Mainly so she has an idea, but Kate really doesn't have a clue how much effort goes into making something like this, not by hand. ]

[ Sometimes Dean looks back on that boys home and thinks what a fuckin' mistake, looks back and tells himself that was the only thing I ever wanted. It was consistency in a world where there was very little save for motel rooms and looking after a little brother who didn't want to be looked after. But even under his father's regime, life had its consistency. There was order in the chaos and Dean told himself that was what was important, the only thing that mattered. He was his father's son and it was all he needed, the only rule he lived under.

The rest? Was a mess. School, girls, puberty - it was something he pushed aside and tried his hardest to laugh at, as if it didn't matter for him in the same way it mattered for everyone else. And maybe it didn't, his life was his and yet to everyone else, it faltered and skipped like a broken record, looked wrong and off kilter. He didn't have a home, hardly had a father, and talked back faster than any teenager should have been able.

But at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered was what his father said. That, at least, was simple. And it is no longer - there's no father to provide order and while Dean likes it that way? It still complicates things, even when he looks back and lets the shadows of his father's existence override everything he does. ]

You and me both. [ He almost laughs at that: Him. Prom. What a joke, the very idea of its laughable, even if it's not the whole story. But it still stings in some weird way that his life was never a thing that anyone else could bear to live and it's why he pours out the last of the alcohol into their twin shot glasses and thinks that they need more when they don't. They don't. But god if he doesn't want to return back to his apartment even vaguely sober, his brain not yet fucked up enough to keep him from thinking. ] Might've missed it in the middle of a move, even if i'd wanted to go.

Another few days? [She shrugs.] I'm not, like, an expert at this. [Yet. Garment construction is new to her, and a lot more interesting than she thought it was.]

Anyway, it's only fair, and I don't want to lie to him about how much work I did. [She doesn't want to disappoint the only person not to hate her on the spot.]

[ nodnod okay then. she's not going to argue, because kate really has no idea at all. like. not even a ballpark of how true or not that could be. so she'll take emily's word for it.

the next statement has kate's face turning a bit more sombre, because: ] Makes you not want to lie, doesn't he? [ even omitting the shit she did in the past, back after their shared dream, was painful to do, no matter how well-intended. ]

[ It was... an isolated time. Not literally. There were no locked doors or constant moving for them - in fact, most of Kate's teenage years looked normal to most people who glanced over. Rebellious, perhaps, with the vices and the skipping class, but normal.

Looking a bit closer would be enough to see that, despite the others surrounding her, Kate only ever seemed to stick with Marc. That she never seemed to really talk more than a couple of words to most of the people who filled up the spaces around them. That she almost never seemed to speak with Marc - but when you can live in each other's head, what is the use in physically exerting the effort to speak?

It was all a delicate, easily shattered facade of trying to do the same things everyone else does. Of getting drunk at house parties and in parks, playing stupid games that ended with some overexcited boy's hand sneaking a bit too far up a thigh in the corner of someone's living room. Getting kicked out of school discos because your friends spiked the drinks while you smoked in the bathroom.

Kate probably would have gone to prom, if it was at all a thing. How long she would have lasted there, with the awkward dancing and chaperones she imagines... that would be another question entirely.

She tips the last shot down her throat and shakes her head clear of some of the fuzz. Not a lot of it. Just enough to straighten her vision for a bit. ] Prob'ly didn't miss much. [ She shrugs, but it's awkward and exaggerated when alcohol impairs every movement. ] Get drunk. Get kicked out. [ Do it all in something fancier than jeans and a hoodie.

Which sounds like shit honestly. She never liked dressing up even when she was getting paid for it. ]

Makes you want to stop being a complete bitch.

[That isn't a dig at Kate -- at least, not on purpose. Because goddamn, exacerbating Sharon's shit was kind of a dick move. But no, this is all about how much of a jerk Emily has been all these years.]

[ well, kate doesn't take it that way, at least? not because it wasn't a dick move, but because she simply isn't thinking about it, concentrating instead on the little bits of goodness they can manage here and now.

she lapses back into silence, feet tapping out an idle rhythm in their boredom. ] S'pose this shithole let us meet him. [ and others, although right now they're not as important. it's one thing this place gave her, a chance to befriend someone she was quickly coming to trust, likely to eventually consider as close as some of her oldest friends.

it gives her a little hope. just a flicker of something. ]

Yeah.

[Shifting her gaze, Emily starts to thread some more rocks, slowly, as if every one she picks takes her full attention to thread. It really doesn't make sense to her why Glacius is here, but she's selfishly glad he is, because Kate is right. They got yanked here, and they got to meet him, and he makes Emily want to be better. Only Matt had made her feel that way before, and only since coming here; but without him physically here, she hasn't felt pressure to change. Glacius, by his mere belief in her, fuels her drive to be the best, and in a place where none of what she's proud of back home matters, that's the only thing she has to really strive for, the thing that she truly finds fulfilling.]

It's fucking poetic, if you're into that.

[Matt would say it is. Sam might, too, always looking at things from the bright side of life.]

[ She snorts. ] Not really. [ into it, that is. But she gets that feeling, the desire to be better. The feeling like you can make up for some of the shit that you've done because Glacius believes you can. Or something. Kate's never really known a person to do that before - even Faith only inspired the idea that their lives, their situation could be better, not that she could seek forgiveness for the shit that she pulled in that situation. The only time she's felt it was in her own clinic work.

Not that she, or Em, probably, would ever say as much about that. ] There enough stones for this? [ she wasn't really sure how many to get. She can always go searching for more. ]

[ Dean's not truly sure what his idea of high school is supposed to be, or even what it was at the time. The boys home was a shameful place of refuge, another thing he never speaks on because it's off the beaten path, because it doesn't fit with the rest of his life, as if it's running just sideways to everything else. Like Lisa, it's not a story he's willing to tell to anyone, because he just doesn't know what to do with the idea of lost comfort when it was never his to begin with.

Though, it has to be said that Dean knows his childhood was a fucking mess, just like he knows it was in equal measure for Sam. Nothing could have stopped the way his father taught Sammy to hold a gun against the demons that were so obviously waiting in his closet and nothing could have changed Dean's dire need to go on hunts with their father in a way where he was included. How could school have possibly mattered in any of that when Dean was solely obsessed with becoming, one day, the man who raised him.

It mattered enough for him to get his GRE but even that feels a farce - education means nothing to Dean past the sad lie of normalcy, something he lost years ago, and it didn't mean anything to him then either. Just like the idea of prom, it was all idiotic and unnecessary and Kate's words make him actually manage a laugh, the booze opening him up to humor in a way he doesn't usually find. ]

Get high on the back lawn? Yeah, sounds like my kinda shindig. [ Because admitting to even more bad behavior is the best way to make friends. ] Tryin' to think if we even would'a been allowed to go.

[ Admitting to bad behaviour is a flawless way to make friends, at least when they're the last person who can judge that kind of behaviour. Even if getting high had never been her thing beyond a brief try once or twice behind the school building. It still sounds better than the awkwardness of teenage dance events. ]

... You here for the fireflies? [ It's hard to keep track of everyone and when and where they all met after a while, and the events blur together without a proper date system. But when speaking of highs it's hard to forget the little fuckers buzzing around her head like some weird halo. ]

[That's not a bad thing to agree about. The last thing Emily needs is to be making clothes and such with someone who likes waxing poetic. Ash keeps it under control, and even if she didn't, Emily would tolerate it because it's Ash.

But no one else, holy shit.

At the question, she looks up at what they have left on the table.] We might be short a strand or two. Get more of these, they're perfect.

[She really hopes Glacius likes this.]

[ Kate nods, mentally noting that. She's still... not entirely okay going to the caves alone, still finds herself hesitant and feels her breath hitching.

But she doesn't have to go that far in, she probably won't see a monster.

Even if she does, combat is worth it. ] Can do.

[Things about Kate Emily doesn't know, things about Kate Emily doesn't care about. As long as she gets more pretty rocks for GLacius's sash, she's good.

There's another long silence, and after what feels like hours -- when they're nearly done with what rocks they have -- Emily glances up at her, not quite scowling, and murmurs,] Thanks.

[That's all Kate will get, at least for now.]

It's nothing. [ She threads the last rock before saying that, placing it next to the others with care. ] Have the rest of them tomorrow.

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seriously how dare they do this????

this wasn't even supposed to happen!!!

what WAS supposed to happen i mean really

this....... is a good question

i'm full of them.

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jdkslfa

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