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[moneyballer]

username: I CAN B UR DADDY

✉ ☏ 📷

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this bonding is all cute okay

[onethousen]

I don't know. Not exactly.

( she admits. the time in Perdition's Rest threw off her count. being in Oska, then there, and now back in Oska? )

It was spring when we'd moved. Then here, it's been fall, and winter. I don't know how many months it is by now... I'm not really sure what calendar we're supposed to look at. Time's been really weird.

( because she's also been told that the time here means nothing, in a sense. that one day, they will be able to send them home, and to the time they were last seen. so what is it? what is this time passing? what are the memories and experiences, lovely and horrible both, going to mean in the end? it's complicated. she sets all that to the side, for now. )

Dad got lost when we were trying to get to our new house. I was going to start school in a new town, and I wasn't happy about it, not really. Then we were at the abandoned theme park... Dad said a lot of them went under when the bubble burst in the 90's.

( she's reciting this without fully understanding the economics she's discussing as if they're somehow disconnected from her reality. in ways, that's exactly what they are: disconnected. )

He and my Mom couldn't keep themselves from eating. There was all this food there, and no one around, and — and that's when things started going weird. I didn't remember that stuff until I'd been here for a while, you know?

[moneyballer]

[There are moments in time where one can feel a mood shift entirely.

Asher sits up suddenly, posture straightening as he processes her words. Until now he had suspected that her world was as normal as could be, because she was so very human, so very familiar. Then she says things that don't make sense, that strike him as peculiar.

Dad got lost.

She recounts all this like a person trying to make sense of a table full of scattered photographs, as if she's seeing everything and it's not making sense.

He and my Mom couldn't keep themselves from eating.

To be fair, his world isn't really normal either. How normal is it, to work in a house where so many people whisper and worry all the time, to work in a town where his professor's husband went missing and girl's body was found in a water tank. Asher has yet to process this.

He is always in the dark.]

You didn't remember... Like, you just didn't think about it or-

[A thumb rises, pressing against his lip in thought.]

There was a moment where it all came back to you?

[onethousen]

( She hesitates, turning both options over in her mind. Neither is quite right. She didn't choose not to think about it; it hadn't been reachable. Not forgotten, not forever, but forgotten for the time being. And it hadn't all come back at once. There'd been no dam that broke, revealing all these things.

They'd come back in pieces, until the narration started to make sense again, with gaps and stutters like an incomplete reel. Watching a movie that had audio on, but skipped, screen going dark and starting up again somewhere further along.

She shakes her head, licking nutella off her spoon. )

Kind of not either? It hasn't all come back to me. I just remember most of it now. Stuff would remind me? Here and there, like seeing something out of the corner of your eye in a place you walk by all the time, only noticing it for real for the first time.

[moneyballer]

[what the flying fuck]

Um.

[don't b this forthright u pile of human excrement]

That sounds kind of effed up, yo.

[onethousen]

( she pulls the spoon back out of her mouth, giving Asher a very grave nod. )

It was very effed up, yo.

[moneyballer]

[Asher is more of a feeler than a thinker by far, and it is times like these where his emotions get the best of him.

There is nothing he can say to make any of this better, but there is something else he can do.

He wraps his arms around her waist all of a sudden, the gesture similar to something he often did for his sister when they were both younger, when the Millstone siblings were still talking and their old house still felt like it contained something that resembled a family.]

You'll get out of here.

[And he will do everything he can to make sure that it happens, even if that isn't very much at all.]

[onethousen]

( the hug surprises her, if only because people here are across a spectrum of physically affectionate. Asher is easy to see as being affectionate. maybe because his angles are so soft, compared to many. it's something she appreciates even as she manages to wrap her arms around him too, spoon clutched in hand but angled away from his back. no need to get him dirty. )

Mm. Asher, where do you want to be?

( she knows she'll end up somewhere, sooner or later. but... )

[moneyballer]

[He is soft nearly everywhere, from the line of his jaw to the space around his middle. The softest part of him, however, would definitely be his heart.

Her question is enough to make him draw back, gaze quizzical as he considers the weight of that inquiry. It is one he used to ask himself all the time, one he knew the answer to from the day he first saw his father in court. Or at least, he thought he knew the answer, until David Allen's case changed his mind.

Such is the nature of a ripple effect. The waves have risen and fallen and shaken his identity further, seeping inwards and dismantling the core.]

What?

You mean like, in 20 years from now, or...?

[onethousen]

( she leans back to look up at his face. )

Do you actually know where you want to be twenty years from now?

[moneyballer]

[If you had asked him this question a year ago, he would have known the answer.

Rich, successful, and with some bodacious babe to call his wife... To be top gun at some bombass law firm, or even a judge like his father.

Now he isn't sure if he wants any of those things.]

I don't know.

[Honesty is something he is learning a way, because the person he's spent the most time lying to in the past twenty-five years has been himself.]

Happy, I guess.

That's it.