WHO: Penny Dale and Dash Exley WHEN: After these texts! WHERE: Penny’s place. SUMMARY: Penny has a confession. WARNINGS: Ghosts, March fire things, accidental arson.
In the week following her panic-induced hospital visit, Penny had done her best to put the incident behind her. It was an accident, not a curse. The words became her mantra as she threw herself into yoga and other things people did to ‘center’ themselves, trying to regain her usual sense of IDGAF. And when all else failed, she called on Dash, because surely Dash would know what to do.
It was a less-than-perky Penny who answered the door, her hair lifeless and her makeup non-existent. She even wore her glasses instead of contacts; a true testament to how far she’d fallen. “Dash, I think something terrible is going to happen to me,” she declared as she retreated to her couch to flop upon it with a dramatic sigh.
A determined-to-be-even-more-cheerful-than-usual Dash appeared at Penny’s door, bearing cupcakes and a bright smile. “Why?” He asked, drawing out the vowel as he glanced around the room, looking for further signs that Penny had been abducted by aliens because the real Penny would never answer the door looking like that, even for him. Especially for him. “I got cupcakes?” He tried.
“Ghosts.” She spoke the word with absolute seriousness, as though she hadn’t suddenly developed a belief in the supernatural out of left field. Maybe she wasn’t the real Penny. “Cupcakes?” Her head tilted as she mentally calculated how many calories she could reasonably splurge on before she’d have to log extra workout hours. “I’ll totally have a cupcake.” She propped herself up on one elbow as she held out one hand in the universal ‘gimme’ gesture.
“Ghosts.” Dash repeated, lips falling into a thoughtful frown before biting into a cupcake. “Okay, go on,” he said, after holding one out for her.
There was no good way to scoop up a fingerful of icing while reclining dramatically, which left Penny to heft herself upright in order to eat. “I need advice,” she confessed, finger still in her mouth as she went straight for the best part of the cupcake. “Because I think that like maybe I have to be a responsible adult and stuff? But you can’t tell anyone. Like, a-ny-one.”
He nodded solemnly, even though he barely counted as responsible or an adult, but oh, well. “Spill your guts, girl. I gotchu.”
She hesitated a moment longer, scrutinizing him carefully as she took another fingerful of icing. If there was anyone she could trust, it would be Dash, right? “I don’t mean real ghosts, obviously.” She waved that off with one hand, still sporting an icing-laden finger. “But like maybe I did something bad when I was younger, and now I feel like it might be coming back to bite me and I should just go while I can?”
Dash took another bite and watched Penny with a mix of interest and lack of full comprehension as she continued with her vague explanation. “I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Like. I get what you’re saying, because lol yeah, I know that feeling,” he waved a flippant hand, “but like. How bad are we talking?” He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Really bad.” The answer was solemn, spoken over the top of her carefully cradled cupcake. It didn’t make much of a shield, especially with half the icing already missing. “But like, not on purpose. I was a kid and I wasn’t trying to do anything bad. It’s just that I’m like pretty sure that everything bad that has happened here is my fault.”
Dash frowned in concern, and got up to take a closer seat to her. “Hey, it’s not, of course it’s not.” It wasn’t making a false promise because Dash knew Penny wasn’t the bad guy she was making herself out to be. Of course not. He abandoned his own cupcake to put his arm around Penny and pull her into a hug. “What’s got you so freaked out, Penny?”
Penny leaned into his side, soaking in that comfort while it was still offered, because she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be offered for long. “It was an accident,” she mumbled into his shoulder as she clung to her cupcake like her life depended on it. For the most part, Penny only cried on cue, but the tears threatened to spill over now. “I wanted to impress them and I thought we could like scare the other kids or something when we went back to the house…”
“We’ve all been there, Pen. What happened after that?” He rubbed her back in soothing circles. Not that he was trying to be obtuse on purpose but, well. Penny was barely making any sense.
“The fire.”
“The fire?” He repeated, things finally sliding into place. “That was you?” He didn’t move away, though. Maybe Dash was too far removed from the whole thing to really feel impassioned about it, but also, Penny was clearly very broken up about this, and that was more important than anything.
“It was an accident!” she all but shouted, clinging to the only fact that made her sound less like a murderer. Because she wasn’t. She wasn’t. “I was going to show Alice and Robby the candles, and I was trying to light another one and something startled me. I swear I tried to put it out…” He hadn’t tried to push her away yet, but there was still a plaintive note in her voice begging him to be on her side in this.
Of course he hadn’t pushed her away. Nor was he going to. “I know you did,” he nodded, still leaving his arm around her. “But you still think everything that’s happened on the set is because of that.” Dash asked slowly.
Penny bit her lip, staring down at her (slightly crushed) cupcake as she worried the skin with her teeth. “Not like, that I think it’s ghosts or anything,” she clarified after a moment, her voice still choked up, “but just that like none of it would’ve happened if I hadn’t started the fire. Moira would be alive, and Cora, and Alice. It’s all my fault.”
“Okay, but you didn’t murder Moira,” he pointed out. “So like. Blaming yourself for EVERYTHING is a little ridic.” Dash paused for a moment. “How did you - how did you make it out alive? Since Alice, um. Didn’t.”
“But maybe this is some kind of karma thing for never telling anyone before?” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffling as she did so. Ridic as it might be, there was still a knot in the pit of her stomach that refused to unravel. “They’d gone to get something,” she recalled, grimacing at the mention of Alice’s fate. “I really thought I’d put it out but like I didn’t want to stick around to check? I remember thinking how pissed Cora was going to be when she saw the burn marks and that Alice would never want to hang out with me again. So I just ran away.”
Dash bit his lip because, yeah, that part wasn’t so good. “It...probably would have been good to tell someone?” He scratched the back of his neck after setting the cupcake down. “You still can, if you want? Maybe make up for what you didn’t do?”
“I don’t want to get into trouble,” Penny admitted in a low tone, selfishness at war with that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “What if I get arrested for not telling anyone? I don’t know if they can arrest me for that.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. There was a lot he didn’t know in this case. And then he just sat there, in probably one of the longest bouts of silence Penny had ever experienced from him.
“Maybe I should like… get a lawyer or something?” she suggested after a long moment, her features twisted in dismay. “And they can help me figure out what to do. Or if I should do anything. Like maybe I should just quit the movie and work as a receptionist forever, which would totally suck but at least then maybe I wouldn’t feel like I did the wrong thing?”
“I mean. Was that working before?” Dash raised an eyebrow. “My lawyer hates me but he’s been helpful. So. You could do that. With money. Lawyers are expensive,” he grimaced.
Penny shrugged, staring down at her cupcake like it held the answers to life. “At least I wasn’t making money off of what happened before? That’s something. I think.” She pulled at the edge of the cupcake wrapper, tearing it away from the cake. “I don’t think I can keep the money. And I’d need that to pay a lawyer.”
To be fair, cupcakes had more answers than Dash likely did. “Thennnnnn idk. It’s your call; I can’t tell you what the right thing is because I make terrible life decisions and no one should listen to me.” He said this a little more sadly than intended. This whole self-awareness thing was a bitch.
If nothing else, cupcakes offered sweet oblivion of a sugar high. “I still love you though,” she promised, giving him a little nudge to his side for that sad tone. “And at least you’ve never like, done something so awful that you’ve ruined a bunch of people’s lives because of it? Just try to remember that. Your advice has to be better than mine.”
“Mmmmmm okay true but also never ask me anything money related because I am so dumb about that stuff.” He shrugged with a slight smile. “Anyway. We can figure it out later. Let’s just eat cupcakes and watch Netflix or something.”