Arrival: The Note (#72 -- Origins)

Though Jo had managed to stay out of her friend's business for a couple of days, she had barely left the Inn, could barely speak to anyone else for nerves.

She settled for some classic time-biding techniques, drinking, playing cards, and watching the entrance to the tavern portion of the inn where she knew that Evan would appear from, were he to come out of the room he'd just been assigned. She knew him to be a curious sort... but she also knew that what happened after the end of the world, back home, did a lot to a person. More than could be shown across their body, surely. Even if Evan had only been hit by the fallout of whatever had ended their home for a moment, it was too much to deal with on his own.

Maybe Jo was projecting.

By the second day, she managed to get all the way to lunch before she couldn't help it anymore. She was stewing with questions and concerns and all sorts of shit that had her head all abuzz.

She knocked on Evan's door, a plate in one hand, a couple of beers clutched in the other.

It wasn’t really as if waiting made the situation any less weird or any more manageable, and in fact, the first day he was up and about and already trying to make himself go out and investigate. After being ushered from Jo’s room to get his own before his first night in this place he had at least gotten a more calm-eyed look at the building he was in, for all that helped — but when he woke up lucid the next morning and tried to get himself together to investigate further, he faltered.

Some of it was the pain of his injuries, which lingered. Mostly-healed was not entirely healed, and seeing himself in the mirror made him falter. Aside from the angrily flushed scar lines where his cuts had healed, there was a pink strip of skin across his face that he could only hope would fade with time — was already looking better than yesterday, really. His eye, the one that had gotten the brunt of the wax, was deeply, deeply bloodshot; it was hard to see if there was anything else wrong with it. He could see out of it, but looking into the mirror, looking into it, made him dizzy.

He chalked that up to the horror of injury and tried very hard not to think about it. In fact there was a lot he tried hard not to think about, not without further information; he focused on getting his mind right, on riding out panic until it ebbed back down to a tightness in his chest that settled and did not go away.
That day, he spent consulting the cards. It was still a skill he was trying to both get used to and get his head around;  he didn’t know how much he believed, versus how much just led him to interesting trains of thought, versus desperately wanting something to have knowledge he could work out. The pulls were ambiguous, and finally he cut himself on the corner of a card and took that as a sign that he should stop. He only really left the room after dark, and only briefly to try and find food. Some… food… had been left; a basket of things he was not sure he trusted. The pizza roll looked almost normal, but posed enough questions to make him want to stash it for now. At least everything was wrapped to last, it looked like.

The second day he woke up not long before noon and spend the next hour trying to clean himself up and psych himself out of this room. There would be answers out there, not in here. Jo was out there; that had to be a good thing, but he was still deeply uncertain about… her whole deal.

Her arrival startled him. Tension spiking, he stared at the door for a moment before peeking it open. He had never been a drinker beyond the casual social type, but the alcohol was unmistakable, and Jo was familiar, and that startled him by being a very welcome sight.

“That,” he said, “that seems like a good idea. Um. Come in.”

She did, pushing th door the rest of the way open in her haste to put her load down. She looked around the moment she'd crossed the premises, almost bird-like with her darting need to take it all in. Thankfully, nothing that pinged her danger senses reared its ugly head. If she let her guard down a little, she didn't show it.

She turned to him plate first, aiming to push it into his hands. "Moffolo mutton and mash tonight. The other veg is kind of like a cross between broccoli and, uh, cheetohs. It's not bad." Separting out the two tankard-like mugs, she offered one forward. "This stuff is worse than Pabst, but there's usually better. Someone apparently cut off the last shipment."

A quirk of her shoulders as she took a generous gulp of her own tankard showed how much she cared about the quality.

"You look better."

He took the plate, he took the tankard. There was a little desk in the room, hotel-style, but they did not seem to imagine one would need two chairs within a room, so he sat gingerly on the edge of his bed and balanced the plate on his knees. Had she always seemed so jumpy? He'd never paid that much attention.

He'd been cobbling together some dry comment about various shades of piss-flavoured beer, until her last comment made him snort and close his eyes. "I suppose that must be true." He'd looked better, too, though.

Forcing himself to open his eyes again and not be shitty about it, he took a breath and followed up with, "thank you for the medical attention. And the save." He'd had some time to think about that.

She shrugged it off, dropping into the seat he'd left to her and immediately kicking it back onto two legs, her own feet balanced on the desk. She still had orange grit wedged into her hard-done-by boots. Moreover, she looked heavily tanned and... not living her best life, exactly, but she seemed lazer focused on him in a way that she never had when they'd been sharing the same social circles. Back before.

"How are you holding up?"

He stared at her. He thought about doing something illuminating and dramatic, like take a long pull of the beer or maybe scream.

Instead, he said, "I don't know." And then, "Well enough. Alive. I spent yesterday taking stock." The healing burns on his hands pulled as he shifted the beer from one hand to the other, both hands around its cool surface. "Inasmuch as that's possible. I still can't make sense of any of this, though I do admit I am likely going to have to leave my room in order to do that." There his voice got a sharp, wry edge; self-deprecation, or a cousin thereof. He felt the pressure of a day of idleness like a headache. Now he did bring the drink to his lips, not taking solace exactly in the watery beer but wanting to give his mouth something to do other than talking.

She raised her glass to that, taking another sip. "Not dead yet. That's something." The sardonic grin that came with that was brittle, and she gave another shrug. "If you haven't chatted with Martus yet, he runs this place and he's got the 'welcome to this world' talk down flat." Setting her mug down, she pointed her fingers out either side of her ear. "Pointy ears, blonde guy, never shuts up. But... he can probably help you get on your feet better than I can. Uh."

Frowning, Jo swallowed back something else she seemed about to say. Instead, looking perturbed, she gestured to him. "I mean, but... I can try, if you want."

"Hm." Did he want? He wasn't sure. The beer really was awful; he put it aside for now, pushed onto a corner of the bedside table, and held the plate instead. It looked like roast beef and mash, and if the vegetables had a weird look they at least echoed the familiar branching spiral of a brassica bred for gardens. Martus sounded familiar; he had poked his nose out briefly yesterday and retreated just as quickly, but blonde... elf? shit... stacked.

He stirred around some mash and gravy with the fork she'd brought him. Very dryly: "As far as I'm concerned more intelligence is better than less."

Jo snorted. "Like, 'what the fuck do I do with my life right now?' or 'do I even want to start thinking about more than today?' because neither of those gets much easier, but it's better than what came before."

That said plenty, even while it said nothing, and Evan, apparently forgetting that forks are for eating, began tapping his thoughtfully on the plate. This place did seem as if imminent danger wasn't an issue, at least in the small bit he'd stashed himself here, but the area where Jo had pulled him through had been...

His memories of it were a bit chaotic. But what he did recall was nasty. "Was it?" he asked. This was one of those thing that had been eating him. He tried to ask gently, at least, though curiosity always sharpened him. "That categorically better?"

Jo leveled him a look. "If we were in Silent Hill before (which I'm gonna say was mostly a cake walk compared to what lived under SAIT,) this is fucking Super Mario World. And I don't know if that's the best way to even think about it, but there's nothing on Earth that explains either place, you know?"

She had been gesturing with one arm as she spoke. When she nearly spilled her tankard, she remembered it was there and took a sip. She managed a mild grimace, but apparently she wasn't impervious to piss-quality brew either.

The juxtaposition of silly and serious -- of a very stupid metaphor with what it implied -- made Evan pull back and beetle his brow at Jo, frowning. It almost set his plate to sliding off his knees, but he caught it before supper ended up a moffolo mash on the floor.

"I'm assuming you mean tonally, not that we are plumbers jumping on angry mushrooms," he tried to rally, or maybe just tried to be sarcastic about. He was a bit shook, though, and he knew it, and clutching his plate he gave her a worried look. "And I'm assuming the silent hill comparison was... was back home. So what I experienced behind the front, before, uh, coming here -- that was... that was typical? That was how it is there now?"

To be honest,  he was still more concerned with back home than he was with anything here.

If Jolene were honest with herself, she was more concerned with home, too. She didn't make friends easily in the best of situations, and for fuck's _sake_, she had been on death watch for the one who ever really got her even _before_ things went to shit. The time spent after the end of everything else had been next to impossible. She didn't really want to metaphorically hop through tubes and launch fireballs at goofy fuckers.

She hated, desperately hated, that she'd been wrenched from someone who had made sense, and worse than that, had left them behind to a fate worse than death. Here she was, draining her big fucking mug, enjoying piss-swill while god knew what Ryan was pushing up back home. It wouldn't be daisies, almost certainly.

So she was looking a little stormy, but she couldn't help herself. She was never good at shit like poker. "I don't know, maybe. W... I didn't run into a lot of people after shit happened. Not people you could talk to." Or wanted to, though she wasn't going to bring up the details without someone threatening to wrench it out of her, and the frown she gave him ought to suggest as much.

There were times, occasionally, when he read the room gracefully. Stressed out and shook, this was not one of them. 

When she was pausing to think, he seemed to remember supper and started to eat in distracted little bites, not really parsing flavour or texture, vaguely grateful they weren't foreign enough to demand parsing. Jo did not look happy to be asked. Fair enough; his own experience had been unpleasant enough that he didn't care to think about it. But it felt important. He felt driven to ask, because he had to know.

"But it was that way for you, too -- perception-bending? Incredibly fucked up?" His shoulders were hunching up, but he could not back off. "How long were you in that? How did you not lose your mind?"

There was the wrench. The brown eyes, one bloodshot as though he'd been punched, soulful and scared... the needing assurances... Jo kind of wanted to punch him in the other one for making her be the one to have to give it. She barely knew him. She couldn't have two fucking puppies on a leash, knowing she'd abandoned one already.

She mulled uncomfortably long over it, afraid of telling him, afraid of not. It made her angry, angry beyond simple wariness. It made her skittish to think too long, or too hard about her own experiences. Flashes of disorientation and stark fear and stark rage popped up in the back of her vision and her hearing when she did that, and now she could feel them foaming just beyond her perception. She cleared her throat, grimacing.

"I don't know. Not exactly. Uh. It wasn't always..." She settled her tankard on the desk unkindly and gestured the best she could at _shifting hellscape_, since putting it to words was too much. "But it was never _safe_, or _easy_. Probably... you said a few weeks passed from what I remember. But I've been here a few months. So... It's like..." She had to look away, partly because she was feeling stressed and flighty at his blood-shot gaze, and partly because she really did have trouble understanding the fuckery of time that had happened. "Maybe weeks. Maybe two or three weeks. Everyone else was dead. Almost everyone. It wasn't good."

"Weeks." There was something so lost about the way she was talking about it. Lost, and furious. It resonated with some echoy chamber in his own psyche, something that had been hollowed out by the experience of having his mind -- the thing he valued most in himself! -- pulled away from him. It was slowly filling back in. But she'd been there weeks.

He'd eaten a bit; he couldn't eat anymore, not accompaniment with this conversation. He traded his plate for his tankard, because only one would fit on the bedside table at a time.

"Jesus, Jo, weeks," he was still a bit floored. Closed his eyes. "No wonder... I mean." Swallowed. He'd had friends in the city, hell, everyone he'd met at college, every bright eye, every kind professor. Everyone he'd spent time with, daydreamed about, tried to make time to get to know better. "Everyone?"

"It got everybody," Jo said. And then paused a moment, and then gave an ugly little bark of a laugh. "That's what happens when you get to the end of everything. I should be dead right now, nine times over." She shook her head, swallowed something in her throat.

She didn't want to tell him that the reason she wasn't was because of the person she'd abandoned. It was complicated enough from that alone. The fact that that person was a mutual friend of their's, and someone who, if she understood correctly, had treated Evan like the sun and the fucking _moon_ when things weren't a burning trash fire of psychosomatic apocalypsii... She didn't want to tell him.

"It was fast for most people. I don't think most of them even saw it coming."

"That's the coldest comfort I have ever heard." It was really too bad the beer was watered down. Evan was too close to the bad trip of his time beyond the front to want to be out of his mind drunk, but that old chestnut about wanting to take the edge off, he suddenly understood it now. This was edged. This was bladed. Something in him was wailing; something was shocked still. Piss-beer or not, he tried in earnest with another nose-wrinkling swallow.

Then he steeled himself. "Tell me about it. Tell me what you can. I want to understand. That's why I stayed past the front in the first place."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Jo kicked her legs down, swung around and planted her boots on the floor. She brought her hands down on her knees, elbows out. Lanky as she was, hair dangling over her shoulders lankly as it did, she looked like a spider poised to... to what, exactly?

She huffed at him, her pose relaxing, but only a little. "Until you showed up, I thought the whole fucking world was over. Everything, gone. You're telling me there's real, normal life out there that's safe and past all that, that it was just _me_... just _us_ that had to go through that shit, like it's just..." She flapped one arm out, violent, "just some unlucky roll of the fucking _dice_? Not, Evan, I'm not here to give you my Ted Talk about my fucking death trip through hell!!"

She swallowed back a sense of bile and dread and remorse and failure, shuddering a little as she thought back to even the surface-most memories. Her voice was calmer, but just on the edge, when she said, "you had all that and you still..." It boggled her mind that for whatever reason he had chosen to sacrifice safety for the certain death of whatever had happened to the rest of the city.

She puffed up and he sat back, pulled away reflexively, his determination an embarrassingly frangible thing just then. He kept himself from scooting away from her, at least, though that anger was there again and it was frankly distressing to see. The judgement was there too, though, and if determination was not a reliable friend just then, defensiveness threw up support struts in its place.

"Look, no one knew -- no one knew anything about what was happening beyond the front. There were some tries to send investigative teams in proactively, but no one was sure if they even made it through, and, and they couldn't or didn't send anything back. No one knew." Or maybe no one who knew was telling. "It was just..." He thinned his lips. Saying it out loud made it feel mad, but there was a pressure behind his eyes. "I thought maybe the trick was waiting for it to come to you. There were evacuations. I stayed back. I set up some protections. I tried to leave a connection I could communicate back through. No one knew anything, and everyone had someone back in the city, and I thought I had a chance to at least... learn something." His fingers tightened around the tankard. "Of course no one thought it was good, what was happening, but... I hadn't anticipated how bad."

Everyone dead. Everyone.

She stared at him a moment, two moments. She could feel the flush on her cheeks, and had a flash of realization. She was jealous. Her lifeline had been looking for someone else all along. And this motherfucker right here, this little _frangible *nerd*_ was it. And he'd managed to see whatever the edge of damnation looked like, and he'd turned and faced it like a desperate sailor turns into a storm.

She looked away, hair shielding her face as she brought a sleeve up to roughly wipe away the evidence of her weakness. The hot air had gone out of her, thinking it through like that. She couldn't double down, as much as she wanted to.

"The people who didn't go apeshit sideways all at once," she said, voice muted and flat, "they went slow. Some slower than others. Some people lost their fucking minds, and other people lost their bodies. Most got both, and... that's what killed them, them as _them_ if that makes any sense."

She refused to look up, or to think too hard about what she was saying. "Do you _really_ want to know that bad?"

And just like that, she painted a different story than the one he had been imagining: of mostly fast death, and then slow death, the worst of it being madness. He glanced at his hands, the streaks of wax-marks on them, and did not quite wonder.

"No." The beer was working some, now that he'd downed most of it. "But I think I have to know. Otherwise, what's the point?" Even if he couldn't communicate it back now. Even if in retrospect it had seemed a profoundly, embarrassingly, painfully naive plan.

She scoffed. What kind of backwards-fucking arrogant bullshit was he pulling, that he _needed_ to know? It made her heart break. She shook her head a little, just enough to sway her dark hair. Shifting a little, she pulled something out of her back pocket. It made her uncomfortable to touch it, but it had shown up in the way that some things just _did_ around here.

She passed it to Evan. "It wasn't me," she said, not looking at him. "It's been that way since I found it. It won't dry out."

Nonplussed by the pivot, but certain that after that, this wet object must have some sort of answer, he carefully put the empty tankard on the floor and accepted what turned out to be a sopping wet envelope. She looked like the monster out of a japanese horror movie, but all grown up; frankly it was a little eerie, and he eyeballed her before looking down at the paper.

"What is this?" he asked, gingerly working at the flap, trying not to tear it.

The envelope was only loosely sealed, as though the glue wouldn't quite set. As he worked it open, it stuck at his fingers, uncomfortable. Jo, who made a non-committal noise, was not going to be any help in answer.

The letter inside was short, blurred here and there by what looked like spatters of oil, and rust... or maybe blood. The writing became badly feathered, and that made it difficult _in the details_, but the thrust of the thing was pretty obvious.

It read like a love letter. It read like a love letter from their mutual friend, who was known for pranks and a sour take on people as a species, but also for a kind of naive optimism for the smaller things in life in the face of his own inevitable mortal deliquescence. Who had dissolved, it felt like, all the yearning in his fat little hands into this piece of sort-of-uncomfortable paper. That Jo had read, and hastily folded up and shoved back into its casing, and thought she would never look at again. At least until Evan showed up.

And then Evan showed up, like this _thing_ had been heralding his arrival. She didn't trust coincidence anymore.

She knew Ryan had never thought this would make it to its target audience, or else he'd have put maybe one fifth of the heartfelt in there, and sixth fifths dry humour that pushed him away from the red-headed nerd. Ryan had never felt safe about his gayness. Jo didn't blame him for it, given what he'd been through. He deserved what had happened the least of anyone.

He thought maybe the most uncomfortable he'd be was the gross, sticky, fragile feeling of the paper as he gingerly wrestled it from its tri-folded surrender, but then he saw his name at the top and his brows squinched together. He flicked a look up to Jo, suspicious but moreso wary: she knew. She'd read whatever this was. He wished she would leave the room while he read it, irrationally, as if that would provide some privacy, because he honestly didn't know what to expect.

He vaguely recognized the handwriting. That thought quickly blew away in the contents of the note, which was more than a note but less than a letter, and said some things that made him fold the thing shut for a moment in absolute discomfort, in second-hand embarrassment, in the sudden and complete knowledge that this was something he was never meant to read. By him, by Jo, by anyone. Ah. That's why she looked like that.

It was good that he didn't really have time or the radius of privacy to unpack whatever the discomfiting sensation tapping the inside of his ribs was, or he would have maybe stopped for good or maybe just imploded. This was not the problem he had anticipated wrestling with today. What the hell does one do, faced down with a supernaturally damp love note?

And what the fuck does one do when one realizes who such a letter is from?

Because, signed or not, he knew who it was from. He didn't have many people close close to him, and only one who could turn a love letter into a dry and cutting and funny self-deprecation. Evan was an idiot. He was crumbling in the wind of his own social blindness. He couldn't figure out if this was real. He glanced over the edge at Jo again, who was... profoundly uncomfortable, if he was reading right. She thought it was real. The tapping in his chest was like punches now.
"Excuse me," he said, folding the letter shut again and tucking it back in the envelope, taking the whole thing, standing up, and leaving the room.