Give A Bitch A Break [October Open]

[crushed_pearls]

Who: Erin Peters and YOU
What: AAAAAAAAA
When: Mid October Forward
Where: Library, Bobby's, possibly elsewhere
Warnings: Tiamat fallout, suicide discussion, depression & stress


There Is No Silver Bullet [Closed To Valdis | Library]

Finding Erin won't be hard, once Valdis is herself again; she's the only soul on the ship currently meditating into a killing trance, a state of no-mind she's hoping will be effective against Tiamat. She's...

Having obstacles. Intrusive thoughts, feelings, anxieties, these impede her meditation, but she's getting there. This has gone on long enough.

Maybe tell her the good news?

Grade A Hypocrisy [Library | After the Previous]

Erin keeps coming to the library to read, on the theory that she's definitely not isolating, look, it's a public space. What actually keeps happening is she gets three chapters in and passes out, drooling on the comfy chair. Coffee? No help. Tea? No help. Turning into a toy robot? The toy robot snores and turns back into Erin after an hour, leaving her sprawled on the table.

The Smoking Prompt [Bobby B's]

I'm writing this on a phone, Erin smokes multiple times a day, find her here. She's still drinking pretty heavily too.

Wildcard

It warm in Hell.

Comments

[crushed_pearls]

When Erin 'spots' Ash as she walks in, she doesn't immediately change her battle plan. Step one: go to the bar. This is where things change, in the form of step two: two glasses of what she can smell him drinking, ordered as a best guess from the ghosts. Hopefully she got his flavor right, because she's not a wolf and that weed stank does make it hard to do the hard-drinker thing of guessing based on scent alone.

Step three: Erin sits heavily at his table and puts a glass in front of him.

Her voice is low, and pained: "Rezz hour she gets up. Maybe three, five minutes figuring it out. Thirty and change in my room trying not to god damn lose it. Start the warning texts after. Seven twenty three, I remember you've been getting close to her, and shoot you one, and never get a reply."

"...Pretty sure I killed you. I don't like killing people by mistake."

[professionalriot]

"Hey, Erin."

He picks up the glass and takes a few small sips as he listens to her. Oh. Wow. No. That's not guilt she needs to carry. Shit. Ash shakes his head hard.

"I got myself killed. I gave up. She wanted me to hurt Valdis, one way or another and I wouldn't." Another drink. "I quit. My choice got me killed. Wouldn't have mattered if or when I got your message. Please don't carry that guilt around for me."

Close to her. If only it was just that. He's in love with her. Ash tries not to let himself feel the jealousy that tries to creep in. Which is hard to do when he feels like an after thought. He's emotional, he knows that, so his darker thoughts don't need to be shared. Those are his to deal with. If he actually stops to deal with them instead of drowning them. Maybe now that she's back he'll get around to that.

"I love her, Erin." He wipes the building tears from his eyes and changes his tone, lighter, teasing. Erin's been put through it too, she doesn't need to deal with his bullshit. "So if there is a next time, would you mind bumping my name up the list?"

[crushed_pearls]

Erin winces. "I wasn't trying to cut you out. I can get...jealous, when the boys are into Valdis, in a way I don't with Ylva or Crabb, I just...wasn't fucking functional, y'know?"

She knocks back half her drink in one go. The super liver is online again and she's gonna kick its ass. "...If it makes you feel any better, I fell for the bluff too. Didn't put two and two together. If that thing was trying to stay alive, then it needed to fucking die. You'd think I would have learned after making the same mistake last year."

[professionalriot]

He makes a similar face and winces. "Shit. Erin. I was...mostly fucking around. I'm sorry. That wasn't a joke I should have made. I don't think you were trying to cut me out."

The rest of his drink is gone. Fortunately when he woke up in his shiny new bed he also seems to have regained his healing ability. He can still get drunk but he has to work for it now. "...I knew it wasn't Valdis. She told me...I'm just scared now that she'll always think I'm weak, that I won't fight when I need to. Hell, I'm scared that's true."

That is the second time someone has said something about last October. "Pratt mentioned last October. What happened?"

[crushed_pearls]

Erin is silent in answer to that question for a long.

Long.

Time.

She barely speaks when she does answer: "I met Daisy last October. She'd been in the ship's engines, and escaped into the body of someone I love. Not gonna say who, that's their business, but it was a mass attempt, and it turned out killing the bodies was the answer. It ended in what's still the biggest massacre of this voyage. And I fucking fell for it."

[professionalriot]

"You didn't fall for it this time, right?" He asked gently. "So why are you beating yourself up?"

Ash might not be an empath like Valdis but many of his gifts deal with emotion, manipulating them and changing them. He has to feel them to control them. She's grappling with a lot of guilt. Maybe something else.

[crushed_pearls]

"But I did. Same grift, different dressing. Shoulda gone hard off the bat and never let up, but I sat down at Tiamat's table and lost fucking Find The Lady." A much smaller sip of her drink. "...You're not weak, Ash. And what's 'weak' to Valdis anyway? It's like asking if the Arctic is too cold for a bonfire; everything is already cold from a bonfire's perspective. If our love was only into cold-blooded killers she'd be dating me & Siffleur, not you, Max, and me."

"Tell you what though, longer you go without telling her what you're afraid of the more annoying it's gonna be. Take it from the queen of that clown shit."

[professionalriot]

He tapped his glass against hers and let out a soft chuckle. She might not get the reference, he said it anyway. "But did you die?"

Ash sank back into his seat and sighed. "She needed me to fight and I sat on the edge of the bed like a wounded, old dog waiting for a mercy kill. It's me though, I know that, I'm the one who thinks I'm weak. I'm projecting my own fear."

He shakes his head. "I'll talk to her. Not yet though. She needs time to work through what happened to her. What Tiamat did using her body. It would be selfish to put my shit on her right now. But, I know, it's dangerous to let it fester. I'm an old man, Erin, I've learned a thing or two."

[crushed_pearls]

No, Erin didn't die. She just sold a head start. She's still not sure why Valdis didn't come at her for that one, and it gnaws at the edges of her heart.

"I'm older than I look too. I'm like, forty three at best guess? One of these years I'll look middle aged and that's how you'll know I'm on death's door." She sighs, and makes a Face. "...That shit ever happens to me? Take me down hard. Don't hold back and don't worry about collateral damage. Fucking destroy me."

[professionalriot]

"Nothing wrong with getting older. Alternative to aging is...well...being dead. So hard no, Erin. You get old and we'll just have to hang out and do old people shit. Whatever that is." Ash bumps his foot against hers. "I'm not exactly like Valdis, not an empath. I have gifts dealing with emotion though. Have to pick up on them to work with them, you know? Yours are loud and I am listening if you want to talk. But, I really, really need you to believe me when I tell you that there is not a single part of me that blames you for what happened to me. No matter what happened between you and Tiamat, none of this is your fault."

[crushed_pearls]

"...If I'd misspoken any harder it woulda been in Japanese." Erin's look of keen embarrassment is at least unrelated to her guilt. "I meant uh. If I get possessed. If I live long enough for my body to get old imma be banging people's grandmothers and making the Fourth of July into the Fourth of Shit."

Pay no attention to her dodging those reassurances.

[professionalriot]

He chuckles at that. "Yeah, wow, I absolutely botched that. That sounds like...don't break a hip in your old age. I've heard that it's all down hill if you break a hip."

One Liner To Break Block

[crushed_pearls]

"Ah, but if I break my hips they gain the power to lie."

[professionalriot]

He just stares at her.

"Was that a Shakira joke?"

[crushed_pearls]

"...Did you think Valdis was the only meme queen in this pack/polycule mashup? Is that what I'm hearing? Ash. Man. Come on. Ash. My guy. My dude. Ash. What the hell."

[professionalriot]

He laughs. "Polycule mashup? Erin! You are...chaos. I love it."

[crushed_pearls]

"Do you now?" Erin kinda leans in, still smiling, and yet...more serious. "I think now might be the time, if you've got a shovel talk to hand back to me. Or concerns to raise. I took my shots earlier, as you well know."

[professionalriot]

"Yeah. I do. You are you no matter what." He shakes his head. "Nope. I don't. I'll just tell you the same thing I told Ylva. You have concerns. You aren't getting enough time to spend with her. You're feeling insecure. Whatever. Just come talk to me. Be honest. Trust that I mean exactly what I say."

[crushed_pearls]

"You gonna give the same back?" Erin asks with an arched eyebrow. "Valdis ain't the only empath laying around the joint, and I gotta tell you, after getting 'I'm fine' from a bunch of teenagers who ain't fine I will not hesitate to suplex your ass if I get that line of bullshit from a grown-ass adult."

[professionalriot]

"Yes, absolutely." He mimicks her expression. "I'm not fine. I'm fucked up. But, it's my own doing."

[crushed_pearls]

"Ain't that the way of it. Well, welcome to the packycule, orgies are every Never but sometimes large piles of wolves lay on people when they fail self care. No T-shirts yet."