Greed (truthorfiction) wrote in commandhq, @ 2018-04-01 00:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | clara theriot, danny costa, p: mj |
Who: Danny Costa & Clara Theriot
What: Running into old friends
When: Saturday 31st March
Where: The cafeteria coffee house
Rating: Low
Change was, as you might expect, a terrifying prospect for Danny Costa. Primarily because he had been subject to the ever changing whim of his father's moods couple with several years of being, in effect, tortured by people who had taken him away under the guise of helping him. Maine had become familiar, lonely but familiar, and now he was moving again. This time to Washington. Not by plane, but by car which, truth be told, was the most humane way of transporting him: putting him to sleep and driving, which was what they did. Less chance of panic then and less chance of everybody getting hurt. He still felt the absence of the others like you would a missing limb and no news - he hoped - was good news, he hoped they were also in a facility somewhere and hadn't been hurt. Not that he'd been hurt by the Regiment since they'd taken him in. Limiter aside he was relatively unharmed and mentally much more sound than he had been when they'd originally converged on the Cheshire Five. Limbo was different, new, unfamiliar, and Danny had spent the first few days in his room. He still couldn't quite tell the difference between reality and the horrible things his mind conjured up and created so he took time to adjust to his new surroundings before venturing out. He had a job here, working in the shoppette, stacking shelves. It made sense: he could listen to music and have no reason to interact. Perfect for Danny and his ongoing recovery process. Danny was, on this particular day, feeling bolder than he had done in a while and so his wandering feet had taken him to the small coffee shop where he stood and perused his choices. So so many choices. Almost too many. Immediately, his thumb went to his mouth and his teeth latched around skin and began to chew as his eyes darted from one item to the next. Lost and bewildered, Danny felt like running. Danny was not the only one feeling like that. For, even though she’d had her sight back for six months now, Clara was still overwhelmed by pretty much everything that had happened. She had been sat at a table in the canteen area, near the small coffee shop because it smelt nice and she had her eyes closed, fingers resting on the table in front of her and nails painted in chipping, dark blue nail polish. It buzzed here, the room. The low hum of conversation, the fsst and pssht of the coffee machines behind her and the movement of people’s feet had been a sound that comforting and familiar. It didn’t matter where you were, the sound of people moving and living their lives was the same. At some point, she’d decided that she would get herself a drink. She didn’t want a coffee- caffeine gave her the shakes - but she did want something warm and she’d seen someone walk past with a hot chocolate that had marshmallows on the side and she desperately wanted one. It was stranger still, getting used to seeing things again. Having been blinded for such a long time, everything was still a novelty. She had her back to the door, to the people queuing behind her, so when the hairs on the back of her neck told her someone had stopped to look at the boards, she wasn’t too bothered. They were - if the look on the person behind the counter’s face was anything to go by - dithering a bit too. “Um,” she put her hands on the counter, leaning forward on her toes. She had shoes on. She’d been told when she was outside of the barracks that she had to keep her shoes on at all times for her own safety but she didn’t like it; they made too much noise even when she was trying to be quiet. Her voice was soft, it always was, she was never a particularly loud person. She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Can I please have a hot chocolate with marshmallows?” The words tumbled out quickly, and she looked down at the counter after a moment, twirling her fingers together, lacing and unlacing them anxiously as the person behind the counter just nodded, a little bemused at the behaviour and told Clara to step to one side while the drink was prepared. She did as she was told and looked over her shoulder as she moved out of the way, seeing a young man next in line with wild, dark hair that was mostly pulled back. Establishing reality from fiction was a challenge for Danny as he was so frequently terrorised by his subconscious that he had to really look at everything around him to work out if it was real or not real. It was hard, difficult to say the least, and it was one of the many reasons he was stood rigidly straight and just sort of stared at Clara with those dark intense eyes of his. That was… Clara, right? Or was it? Thankfully somebody else was interacting with her so Danny could safely tell that she was real and that she was present, she wasn’t something he’d just made up and manifested. He hesitated but only for a moment before he approached. “...Clara?” When it became clear to her that she was being stared at by the man who was chewing on his thumb she became very uncomfortable, looking down at her feet and wringing her fingers together because she wasn’t sure what she had done; had she done something wrong that would mean he was annoyed at her for something? It wasn’t until he opened his mouth and spoke that she recognised the sound of his voice, the timbre and tone. It was a voice that she’d talked down from panic more than once, that had guided her through the hallways of Cheshire. She felt her stomach do a flip-flop and she lifted her gaze again, meeting his eyes with her own. She bit her lower lip and nodded in response to him saying her name. Danny… didn’t look at all how she had pictured him, she’d only ever seen ghosts of what her friends had looked like in her visions, and none of them had ever been clear or consistent, just fleeting. Never enough to grab onto. It was as her eyes met his own that Danny felt that hole inside of him close up that little bit more, not completely, but just enough so it no longer felt like a black hole. “Hey,” he said after a further moment of staring before he rather impulsively gathered her up into his arms and clung, just he clung, he wasn’t ashamed to admit that. Of course he belatedly realised that it might have been a little too over enthusiastic so he eased up some and pulled back with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, it’s just really good to see you.” “You’ve got dark hair,” Clara murmured as he let her go - though she had clung back, too, her fingers twisting in the fabric of his shirt. “I didn’t think you had dark hair.” Ringed fingers lifted to touch his face, skating over the sharp line of his jaw and curve of his cheekbone, cupping his face with both hands before she let go self-consciously. Danny was here. Danny was here and she wasn’t alone. Maybe it would be okay here, then. She just… she didn’t know what they were going to do. She hoped they were in rooms near each other. Maybe the others were here? She had known they would all be together again at some point but when that was she didn’t know. After all, she hadn’t been able to see their escape or capture. She couldn’t read her own future, and their was inextricably linked to hers in some cases, it would seem. Danny’s lips tugged into a soft smile as Clara explored his face in a way not too dissimilar to how she used to when she was- Wait, her eyes. They looked different. Clearer. Green in fact. She wasn’t blind any longer. “No?” He asked, a vaguely amused look passing over his face. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” He lifted his own hand to touch his hair, the dark strands, nervous about the response. Clara tilted her head to the side and looked at him, watching something akin to nervousness flicker across his face as he lifted a hand to touch. She followed suit a second later, her own hand lifting to brush over his hair, resting where the band tied the strands together. She then pushed a few strands that were loosened by Danny’s nervous touch behind his ear. Her lips were curled up into a small smile. “I like it,” she told him sincerely, eyes still roving over his face before she caught herself and withdrew from his space, ducking her head and looking at the floor. “I- uh- sorry.” “It’s okay,” Danny assured Clara with a reassuring smile. “So, uh, what did you end up getting?” He asked, he’d been too busy staring at Clara, trying to assess if she was real or not to pay any attention to what drink she had opted for. He still had no idea what to pick, there was way way too much choice, and he wasn’t used to choice. “Hot chocolate,” Clara said, turning her head a little to look back at the counter where there was a hot drink waiting for her in a tall glass on a small plate with marshmallows on the side. She bit her lower lip, “You wanna try it?” Danny gave a nod of his head. “Yeah, that would be nice.” Might help him decide if hot chocolate was a thing he liked and would maybe want to enjoy in the future. Honestly the Regiment was all new experiences and stuff, really different from Cheshire, and Danny was still trying to adjust when honestly adjusting wasn’t really a strong point. He glanced around and gestured. “We should sit, maybe?” New experiences were one thing, Clara thought, but they were terrifying when done alone and that was something that she’d learned in the base she’d been in before this one. At least here there was someone else that she knew, someone who knew her. “Yeah,” she agreed, carefully picking up the small plate that her drink was on and she walked over to the table she’d been sitting at previously, resuming the position she’d had before, facing the large window so she could look outside. It had been such a long time since she’d seen the outside world that she wanted to make the most of it. When Danny sat opposite her, she tilted her head at him and frowned a little, patting the table next to her, putting the hot chocolate in the empty space beside her and then looking at him expectantly. Danny smoothed his hands over the table before he pulled his fingers back in towards his palms and one finger reached across to his thumb to rotate a ring placed there. He felt better having somebody he knew right there with him, especially somebody who knew what it meant to come from Cheshire. He had sat opposite to Clara, assuming that she’d want her space, but when she made it clear that he should sit next to her he gave a sheepish smile and eased onto the seat next to her. “Didn’t want to crowd you,” he explained. Clara snorted and looped her arm through his, shifting herself a little closer and resting her head on his shoulder, her fingers idly playing with his as the hot chocolate sat in front of them, the cream on the top slowly melting into the warm drink, marshmallows sitting untouched on the side. “You think we’ll find the others?” she asked, her eyes fixed on his hand where she twisted one of his rings, her touch gentle and curious. “I hope so,” Danny said honestly and earnestly because he felt better having found Clara again but he still didn’t feel whole. Not the way he did when they were all together and it felt very much like them against the world. “I mean, we were all taken, they’re in this system somewhere. Just a matter of being patient.” He reached out to steal and bite down on a marshmallow. “Mmm, these are good.” “I know that you’ll find them again,” she told him quietly, not letting go of his hand even as she reached out to help herself to a marshmallow, but instead of eating it she dropped it into the drink where it started to melt on the top. “Hopefully I’ll be with you when that happens.” She tilted her head to the side and rested it against Danny’s shoulder, closing her eyes just for a moment so that it was as close to before as she could make it. “I’m glad you’re here,” she told him, resuming playing with the ring on his finger, twisting it round and round gently, the same way she had seen him do earlier. The same way she had seen over and over and over in visions when they were under the ‘care’ of the Cheshire facility. She just hadn’t known the hands she was seeing belonged to him. |