Dylan is (volatile) wrote in repose, @ 2018-01-15 20:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, dawn laurent, dylan michaels |
Dylan & Dawn
Who: Dylan and Dawn
What: Oblivious run-ins
When: Recent? Like now-ish.
Town was the same. He saw it on the way in, palm against bus window until the condensation bled around his fingers and all he could see on the road in was hand-sized, fingerprint smudged. Town was the same, maybe a couple people different but it didn't look like Christmas had come and gone. New Year, fresh start, all that shit. Lot of people made resolutions. Go to church, go to the gym, be nice to your neighbor. He made recipes instead. Kept a list inside his head, all the things a year of time could bring. Dylan had lost it this time around. New Years, with a beer and a list and a set of sticky-paged books, picking out a year's worth of ingredients that cost more than a day's wages. New Years was a smudge, smear down the page until he was in January and he didn't remember December or November neither.
Town was the same.
They used to time the juice up to the Friday in the month the moon got full. Town went crazy anyway, right? Wolves in the woods and spooks in the cemetery and Area 52 had that on lock. He used to feel it under the hairline, in the jump of his pulse, all that twitch and anticipatory antsy when the doc said 'squeeze please' and jammed a needle in his arm. She was pretty, the last one. Redhead, white coat, looked like maybe she could sever your internal organs with a look. Hard pretty.
But Dylan wasn't riding whatever cocktail they were playing with this week. One month on, one month off. Now he felt like the smudge on the page, wiped out, wound down. They said this was another set of tests. Endurance and they made him pound it out on a treadmill, made him try to sleep through late nights with the lights wired up never to turn off. Whatever they were testing, Dylan didn't know. He wasn't smart enough to figure it out and besides - Gabs wasn't in a hospital bed permanent, and that made all the guess-work irrelevant.
So he was dragging. Head heavy, veins like lead, tattoos mostly covered on his arms and back under gray-marl hoodie and flannel underneath but the collar-part exposed the climbing vine of something that had been a hell of a good idea at the time. Town was the same, and he had a duffel bag to raid the trailer with, stuff that made a clinic stop look like a place to crash. Books, mostly. Couldn't take a casserole dish in but he could take books to thumb through. And the journal that was a short-list of recipes from the last couple years, because until they let him out, until he could eat outside a canteen with a doctor jamming all of it down on paper, this was it. Recipes and theory.
He was dragging and town was the same so he wasn't looking wherever the hell it was he was going, duffel-heavy and back toward the bus-station. He collided, full-force but normal human strength and tired, so it was a body-weight check against the poor girl who was playing lineback and a shuffle of his feet as he tangled them.
"Sorry, sorry, shit, man. You OK?"