(no subject)

[littlehurry]

Who: Eden Chen & Rye Ashburn
When: Sunday 06/18, mid-late afternoon
Where: The Space Between
What: 18 1/2-ish hours after this, as planned.
Warnings: Two dumdums ♥

Hanging around The Space Between for the second day in a row, Eden's just finished telling Rye everything. She lets it all sink in between them, chin in hands and gazing into his face over the top of her cocktail. She knows she looks tired, raw and a little colorless after her exploits yesterday: high and drunk by 6PM, folding herself back into the space behind Willy's brain with evil, disjointed glee at his future hungover discomfort. She also knows that everything she's just said is, on its face, absolutely insane. But it still feels good to let it go for once. Rye is a stranger. Objective. Maybe, a little bit now, or a little bit later, a friend.

She smiles at him and shrugs, leaning over to sip at her vodka-soda through its tiny red straw like a hummingbird. "So that's umm, the gist. And I have… feelings about it."

“Wow.”

Rye looks up from his beer to watch Eden, like he might see some sign of that other dude in her. She just looks like a normal person, though. As normal as any of them are anyway. Sort of tired looking and a little drunk (but so is he).

“That fucking sucks.” He mumbles, trying to imagine the nightmare of never having any fucking privacy. Even if it was his favorite person in the world stuck in his head, that’d probably be enough to make him hate them. “I’m sorry.”

Eden knows exactly what he's doing when he looks at her like that. It's the reason she doesn't talk about this a lot, shying away from the truth whenever it rears its head in public. She just wants to be herself, not part of Willy, smashed into Willy, thinking of Willy. But there's nothing to be done about it. She cares about him.

"It's okay," Eden says automatically, swirling the straw around. Ice clinks against itself. She breathes out, correcting. "Or um, no, it does fucking suck. But I can't do anything about it, so I have to live with it. We have all these schedules and stuff. I'm back inside in like, two hours."

“Shit.” Rye restlessly kicks the bar with the toe of his sneakers. If there’s nothing she can do about it, there’s definitely nothing he can do about it. “Will you still be able to, like, hear me? Or something?”

"Ummm." Eden blinks at him, chewing her glossy lip. The question results in a fluttery mix of shyness and curiosity that requires a drink-finishing pull of alcohol to contemplate. (Hear him what?? What would he be trying to say??? Why would he care??? No one ever tries to communicate with her in there.)

Unfortunately, desperately rolling an answer around in her mind that is friendly-but-not-too-friendly-but-not-discouraging makes her forget the Important Reason she's been leaning in to sip out of the straw, which is that she's broken at least two other glasses this weekend and is starting to feel self-conscious about reporting them to Parson Starling.

As she looks at Rye, the current cup makes a tinkling little crunch between her fingers and some cubes of vodka-scented ice fall out onto the table and floor between them. Also, some glass. But most of it – thank you, Liminal gods – is held just together in her fingers, which for unknown and self-conscious reasons impulsively fling the whole broken mess into the tote at her feet.

"Oops." Now she laughs, and covers her mouth with her hands. Her face is burning. "Omigod, I'm such a freak, but this is like the third time that's happened in here and I just can't right now. Do you think anyone saw???"

Rye laughs too, kind of a quiet wheeze under his breath as he watches Eden toss the entire glass into her bag, ice and everything. It’s going to immediately soak the bottom of the cotton tote. He tries to hide his smile in his beer, which doesn’t really work. The absurdity of it all has cracked his composure.

“Nah.” He shakes his head, not even actually looking around to see if that’s true. “And if they did, who fucking cares. Nothing but freaks here.”

Eden squeaks, giggling, and smooths her dark hair back with her hands like nothing happened at all. Because he's right, and because he's laughing too, she actually feels much better about basically everything. Even if just for a second.

"Umm, sooo how fast can you drink that beer?" The tone is playful, but considerate of the potential for damage now. They're like stupid bulls in an alcoholic china shop. "Maybe we should dip before we – I – break everything in here."

She’s right. Rye can feel gravity like someone might feel the waves hitting a ship. Usually it’s kind of nice, something he can focus on to fall asleep. Today, it’s more like stormy sea sickness. The alcohol kind of helps, dulling everything down and taking away all the sharp edges. Still… she really is right. Just that little moment of laughter made everything in the bar a bit lighter, dust motes and napkin scraps orbiting around him.

“Watch this,” he boasts, and with no hesitation it’s bottom’s up. This won’t be the first beer he’s chugged to impress a girl, and it probably won’t be the last.

Eden raises her eyebrows. The boy is suggestible. The boy can chug. The boy has a halo of tiny things lighting up around him, kicked into rotation by unseen forces.

"Okay, wow," she congratulates, clapping politely and grabbing for her bag. "I wanna see what else you can do. Let's go outside!" (and show off and be stupid, but Rye doesn't seem to need everything spelled out for him).

Reframe the negative, repaint as positive. That's a proven method for survival.